From: Watts Up With That

By: Larry Hamlin

Date: January 29, 2021

Biden’s energy & climate incompetence on full display

"On his very first day in office Biden killed the TC Energy Keystone pipeline project as reported upon by the Wall Street Journal thereby demonstrating his and the Democratic Party’s colossal incompetence and ignorance of energy and climate realities at home and abroad.

His idiotic decision to revoke the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline was noted by the WSJ article as being “a slap at Canada” demonstrating that under his administration “investors that play by U.S. rules” will be subject to arbitrary political whims that represent nothing but Democrats pushing climate alarmism hype in the name of “fighting climate change” with these schemes always being irrelevant to the continuing global CO2 emissions upward climb driven exclusively by the world’s developing nations led by China and India.  

As addressed in the Wall Street Journal article the Keystone pipeline project would have provided for moving up to 830,000 barrels of crude oil per day from Alberta oil sands to U.S. refineries on the Gulf Coast. This long environmentally reviewed project has no material impact on greenhouse gas emissions since this crude will still be extracted in any event whether for U.S. benefit or benefit to other global purchasers that are adversarial to U.S. energy interests.

Shipping this crude using rail or tanker would increase CO2 transportation emissions by between 28% to 42% and with higher leak likelihood. Killing Keystone will strand billions of dollars in Canadian investment alienating a key ally and kill thousands of U.S. jobs including 10,000 American union construction jobs, steel pipe made in the U.S., a 10 million Green Job Training Fund, $500 million for indigenous suppliers and jobs and 100% renewable power to operate the pipeline.

This absurd purely political hand waving action by Biden clearly signals that his administration intends to promote economically damaging energy and climate actions driven completely by irrational claims based upon scientifically unsupported “climate emergency” propaganda." ...

Biden’s energy & climate incompetence on full display

Model projections of future climate focus on temperature anomalies compared to temperatures in a 30-year climate reference period. The inputs to these models include estimates of climate sensitivity, solar forcing, atmospheric feedback and the future rate of change of atmospheric CO2 and other “greenhouse gases”. The temperatures which form the 30-year climate reference period are estimates, since the actual data have been “adjusted”, “infilled”, “homogenized” and have also been affected by site moves, instrument changes, instrument drift, site deterioration and the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect. Temperatures more recent than the end of the 30-year climate reference period are also estimates, for the reasons cited above.

Global temperature and temperature anomaly measurements consist of both near-surface temperature measurements over land and sea surface temperatures over the global oceans. The global oceans comprise approximately 71% of the globe’s surface, or more than twice the land surface area. Ocean surface temperatures are also estimates, since the actual data is subject to all of the issues listed above for near-surface land temperatures, with the exception of UHI. Ocean temperature measurements are also sparse compared to near-surface land temperature measurements, so large areas of the global oceans remain unmeasured.

A recent series of articles by Andy May (here, here and here) present and compare ocean surface temperature analyses reported by several agencies involved in climate change analysis, as shown in the graph below. The graphed lines represent calculated ocean temperatures, rather than anomalies, based on the available ocean temperature data. It is important to note that the same measurements form the basis for all of the reported sea surface temperatures over the period shown in the graph. It is also important to note that the two NOAA sea surface temperature estimates differ by ~5.5°C and that the temperature trends represented by the graph lines are significantly different.

The two NOAA graph lines display a very slight upward trend in estimated sea surface temperatures, while HADSST4 shows a downward trend approximately three times as large as the NOAA upward trend. Note that the graph lines are based on temperature estimates reported to two decimal places. The two NOAA graph lines display virtually identical temperature trends, though the temperature estimates differ by ~5.5°C.

The various agencies which report global average temperature anomaly changes combine the anomalies in these sea surface temperature analyses with the anomalies reported for the near-surface land temperatures. The global average temperature anomaly changes are then reported to two decimal place precision and there is great interest in reported year to year changes of 0.01°C. The precision in the anomaly reporting is greater than the accuracy of the underlying data, even after “adjustment”.

The differences in the reported sea surface temperatures are one of the major reasons why global temperature changes are reported as anomalies, rather than absolute temperatures. However, since the reported average temperature for the climate reference period is an estimate and the reported temperature anomaly is also an estimate, reporting annual changes to two decimal place precision is totally unjustified.

From: Whats Up With That

By: Andy May

Date: January 18, 2021

The Rational Climate e-Book

"Patrice Poyet has just published a new 431-page eBook entitled, The Rational Climate e-Book, it is free to download here. Dr. Poyet studied geochemistry, remote sensing, and computer science at Ecole des Mines de Paris / Nice University. He received his doctorate in 1986. As an expert computer modeler, he spends much of the book evaluating climate computer models and uncovers their often-unstated underlying assumptions.

English is not Poyet’s first language and some of his phrasing is awkward, but even so, the narrative is compelling and interesting. You stop noticing the odd sentence structure very quickly.

Poyet declares that climate science is now the religion of our time. He then notes that cooling is far more hazardous than warming and quotes a passage from Trevelyan’s A Shortened History of England:

“The last half dozen years of Williams’s reign (i.e., the 1690s) had been the ‘dear years’ of Scottish memory, six consecutive seasons of disastrous weather when the harvest would not ripen. The country had not the means to buy food from abroad, so the people had laid themselves down and died. Many parishes had been reduced to a half or a third of their inhabitants.” (Trevelyan, 1942, p. 432).

This was the coldest period of the Little Ice Age. During this time people not only died due to cold and drought in Scotland, but also in China and many other parts of the world (May, 2020c, pp. 26-27). Poyet, notes as many others have, that the climate models used to supposedly “prove” humans are controlling the global climate have not successfully predicted anything. The lack of predictive skill invalidates them." ...

The Rational Climate e-Book

The potential for climate change to have adverse effects on the globe, its climate and its population is the subject of great international angst, fomented continuously by the UN secretariat, the UN FCCC, the IPCC, international NGOs, climate activist groups and numerous national politicians. The adverse effects of concern include rising global average temperatures, rising sea levels, more frequent and intense extreme weather events (floods, droughts, tropical cyclones) ultimately leading to a “crisis”, a “climate emergency” or an “existential threat”. The ultimate fear is that changing climate conditions would pass some “tipping point”, beyond which recovery to some previously acceptable climate state would be impossible. This fear appears to be shared, or at least proclaimed, by national and international politicians and by organizations which would profit from efforts to avoid these outcomes.

The fact that available data and observations do not support assertions regarding more frequent or more intense extreme weather events is largely ignored by those encouraging climate alarm. Each extreme weather event is somehow associated with climate change, whether as a cause or as a contributing factor. These associations are sometimes made by climate scientists, though far more frequently by climate alarmists and politicians, then echoed by the media. Increasing global average surface temperature anomalies are amplified into expressions such as “fireball earth”. Rising sea levels are amplified into concerns for coastal and island nation inundation. Projections are made concerning climate deaths, climate-driven migration, moving or shrinking animal habitat, increasing insect infestation, spreading disease and even pandemics.

Climate scientists have developed a new class of climate models used for attribution studies, which attempt to quantify the purported climate change contributions to extreme weather events. These attribution studies have most frequently been applied to studies of tropical cyclones in an attempt to quantify the effects of climate change on storm frequency and intensity, and on storm speed and its effect on resulting precipitation and flooding related damage. The climate models used in these attribution studies, like all climate models, are currently unverified and the uncertainty surrounding their attribution estimates are very large.

The potential of climate change to have beneficial effects on the globe, its climate and its population and the demonstrable existing beneficial effects are largely ignored. The modest warming over the past 150 years has ended the adverse impacts of the Little Ice Age, which was a period of widespread crop failures and rampant disease. The increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration has had numerous documented benefits, including massive global greening resulting from the aerial fertilization effects of increased CO2 combined with the impact of increased CO2 on the efficiency with which numerous plants use available water. These effects also manifest in increased crop yields resulting from longer growing seasons in combination with aerial fertilization and increased water use efficiency, as well as the availability of more temperature and drought tolerant seeds and improved farming methods.

Politicians have tended to focus of the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) but have almost solely ignored the demonstrable benefits. There is a solid argument that the current SCC is negative and that it will remain so for the foreseeable future. However, all estimates of the SCC are based on unverified models and are therefore questionable.

From: Climate Change Dispatch

By: Dr. John Happs

Date: January 14, 2021

Groupthink, Pal Review And The Climate Fraud

"A little over two decades ago, Dr. Irving Janis, professor of psychology at Yale University, published Groupthink in which he explained how a group of like-minded people could share a common belief or goal whilst completely ignoring any evidence that challenged that belief.

Janis provided the tragic example of the Challenger spacecraft disaster that occurred on January 28, 1986, when a rubber O-Ring failed to contain rocket fuel, allowing it to leak and explode.

A subsequent inquiry showed that the Challenger explosion and the deaths of all 7 astronauts should have been avoided.

The report into the cause of the Challenger accident concluded that a flawed decision-making process ignored warnings about possible problems with the spacecraft prior to launch.

This happened, despite NASA having always taken the position that any launch should be canceled if there was any doubt about the safety of the vehicle.

Engineers from Morton Thiokol, the company that manufactured the booster rocket, had warned that the launch might be risky because freezing temperatures forecast for the morning of the launch might adversely affect the O-Ring seals." ...

Groupthink, Pal Review And The Climate Fraud

The global climate is changing, as it has over the entire period we have been able to study using a variety of proxies. The consensed climate science community attributes most or all of the climate change which has occurred since 1950 to anthropogenic CO2 emissions, as if the natural causes of all previous climate change had ceased to function at that time.

The global community has been encouraging reduction of anthropogenic CO2 emissions to slow or halt climate change since the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992. The most recent and most visible step in this direction was the adoption of the Paris Accords in 2015 and the subsequent submission of Intended Nationally determined Contributions (INDCs) by the signatory nations. These INDCs vary significantly from nation to nation.

The progression of events required to achieve a reduction of atmospheric CO2 concentrations is intuitive and obvious. Nations must first stop increasing their annual emissions of anthropogenic CO2, then begin reducing their annual emissions to zero and finally begin removing some existing CO2 from the atmosphere until some stable concentration is achieved.

The UN Secretariat, the UN FCCC and the IPCC along with numerous NGOs and environmental activist groups are very vocal in their complaints that the developed nations in Europe, the Americas and Australia are sufficiently serious about their commitments under their INDCs and are not taking the steps necessary to reduce their annual emissions to net zero by 2050, even though the INDCs do not include net zero by 2050 commitments.

The UN Secretariat and the other groups mentioned above appear to be far less concerned about the fact that major developing nations which are also major emitters, including China and India, have made no commitments to reduce or even stabilize their emissions and are currently increasing their annual emissions at a rapid pace. China is not only planning and constructing large numbers of new domestic coal-fired electric power plants, but is also funding construction of large numbers of coal-fired power plants in Africa and elsewhere through its “Belt and Roads” program. The pace of construction of these power plants assures that their annual emissions will dwarf the annual emissions reductions committed to by the developed nations, thus preventing a stabilization, no less a reduction, of global annual emissions.

The coal-fired generating stations currently under construction and planned would be expected to continue operation for 40-60 years, or well beyond the net zero by 2050 goal. These plants are intended to meet the growing electricity demand in the nations in which they are being built. None of these nations appear to have any significant interest in risking their future economic development in the interest of halting or reversing climate change.

There are also new coal fired generating stations planned or under construction in Europe and Japan, intended to replace the generating capacity of existing nuclear generators which are being decommissioned as a matter of government policy in Europe, or which were destroyed or severely damaged by a tsunami in Japan. These coal plants will replace existing zero emission generators, thus also increasing emissions regardless of the commitments in the INDCs developed in 2016.

The developed nations are being encouraged to participate in a race to reduce their emissions faster than the developing nations are increasing their emissions. It appears that this is a race which is a lose-lose proposition for the developed nations and a win-win proposition for the developing nations. It also appears to assure that stabilizing global annual emissions will not happen any time soon.

By: Clear Energy Alliance

Numerous individuals and organizations, including Clintel and the Copenhagen Consensus Center, have calculated the potential effect of US CO2 emissions reductions on global average temperatures or temperature anomalies in the future. These calculations have produced very low estimates of temperature or anomaly reductions, typically on the order of 0.1° or less and, in one case, 0.03°C. In making these calculations, these individuals and organizations have fallen into the trap of acknowledging and arguably accepting the narrative of the consensed climate science community regarding anthropogenic CO2 emissions and climate change. This from individuals and organizations which are otherwise skeptical of the consensus narrative and dismissive of the alarmist narrative.

These calculations require numerous assumptions about future global annual anthropogenic CO2 emissions and about the impact of those emissions on global climate. Commonly a ceteris paribas assumption might be used regarding other nations future actions, since they are unpredictable and beyond real control. However, in the current case, the ceteris paribus is not appropriate because numerous countries are not obligated to limit their emissions under the Paris Accords and are currently increasing their emissions.

These calculations rely on the selection of a climate model, a climate sensitivity value and a cloud feedback value. The climate model projected temperature anomalies in 2050 vary from approximately 0.8-2.5°C, so selection of the climate model has a significant impact on the calculation. Climate sensitivity estimates used by the IPCC range from 1.5-4.5°C, so selection of the climate sensitivity to be used in the calculation also has a significant impact. There is still uncertainty regarding whether cloud feedback is positive or negative, so the selection of the forcing value is also critical.

These uncertainties render a realistic estimate of the potential impact of a US move to net zero emissions by 2050 implausible, if not impossible. They certainly render future temperature anomaly estimates expressed to one or two decimal places ridiculous. Interestingly, none of the estimates of the potential impact of US net zero by 2050 provide any information regarding the uncertainty of the estimate, probably because the uncertainty is far larger than the estimated effect.

These calculations are not science because they cannot be falsified, now or in 2050. The impact of US net zero on US emissions would certainly be measurable, but its impact on global emissions would not be measurable. The range of estimates of the potential future impact of US net zero by 2050 certainly do not suggest a climate “crisis”. The willingness of the UN and the global community to accept continued emissions increases by numerous developing nations including China and India do not suggest that continued anthropogenic emissions constitute an “existential threat”. The willingness of these developing countries to continue to increase their emissions does not suggest that they view the globe as being subject to a climate “emergency”.

From: CO2 Coalition

By: Richard S. Lindzen and John R. Christy

Date: December 2020

The Global Mean Temperature Anomaly Record - How it works and why it is misleading

Preface

"The purpose of this paper is to explain how the data set that is referred to by policy-makers and the media as the global surface temperature record is actually obtained, and where it fi ts into the popular narrative associated with climate alarm."

Executive Summary

"At the center of most discussions of global warming is the record of the global mean surface temperature anomaly—often somewhat misleadingly referred to as the global mean temperature record. This paper addresses two aspects of this record. First, we note that this record is only one link in a fairly long chain of inference leading to the claimed need for worldwide reduction in CO2 emissions. Second, we explore the implications of the way the record is constructed and presented, and show why the record is misleading.

This is because the record is often treated as a kind of single, direct instrumental measurement. However, as the late Stan Grotch of the Laurence Livermore Laboratory pointed out 30 years ago, it is really the average of widely scattered station data, where the actual data points are almost evenly spread between large positive and negative values.

The average is simply the small diff erence of these positive and negative excursions, with the usual problem associated with small diff erences of large numbers: at least thus far, the approximately one degree Celsius increase in the global mean since 1900 is swamped by the normal variations at individual stations, and so bears little relation to what is actually going on at a particular one.

The changes at the stations are distributed around the one-degree global average increase. Even if a single station had recorded this increase itself, this would take a typical annual range of temperature there, for example, from -10 to 40 degrees in 1900, and replace it with a range today from -9 to 41. People, crops, and weather at that station would fi nd it hard to tell this diff erence. However, the increase looks signifi cant on the charts used in almost all presentations, because they omit the range of the original data points and expand the scale in order to make the mean change look large.

The record does display certain consistent trends, but it is also quite noisy, and fluctuations of a tenth or two of a degree are unlikely to be significant. In the public discourse, little attention is paid to magnitudes; the focus is rather on whether this anomaly is increasing or decreasing. Given the noise and sampling errors, it is rather easy to “adjust” such averaging, and even change the sign of a trend from positive to negative.

The common presentations often suppress the noise by using running averages over periods from 5 to 11 years. However, such processing can also suppress meaningful features such as the wide variations that are always being experienced at individual stations. Finally, we show the large natural temperature changes that Americans in 14 major cities must cope with every year. For example, the average diff erence between the coldest and warmest moments each year ranges from about 25 degrees Celsius in Miami (a 45 degree Fahrenheit change) to 55 degrees in Denver (a 99 degree Fahrenheit change). We contrast this with the easily manageable 1.2 degree Celsius increase in the global mean temperature anomaly in the past 120 years, which has caused so much alarm in the media and in policy circles." ...

The Global Mean Temperature Anomaly Record - How it works and why it is misleading

Dichotomy 1 : a division into two especially mutually exclusive or contradictory groups or entities

Future US climate policies currently face a clear dichotomy. The policies which will be pursued depend on the outcome of a still contested presidential election between two candidates with grossly different perspectives on the potential future impacts of climate change and the appropriate responses to climate change.

President Trump acknowledges that climate changes but has referred to the characterization of anthropogenic climate change as a “crisis”, or an “emergency”, or an “existential threat” as a “hoax”. He views the Paris Accords as unnecessary and as unfair to the United States and other developed nations. He withdrew the US from the Paris Accords and halted US funding of the UN Green Climate Fund.

President Trump’s EPA administrators ended the EPA practice of “sue and settle”, which was used to impose regulations which might otherwise have been unacceptable. The EPA administrators also began a review of the 2009 EPA Endangerment Finding regarding automotive CO2 emissions, which they believed was unsupported by the science.

These policies would be expected to continue in a second Trump Administration.

President Elect Biden and the Democrat Party have a very different perception regarding climate change and very different policy approaches to addressing the issue. President Elect Biden has described climate change as a “crisis”, an “emergency” and an “existential threat”. He has stated his intention to rejoin the Paris Accords “on day one” and to recommit to funding the UN Green Climate Fund.

He has committed his Administration to a $2 trillion plan to transition the US electricity grid to renewable generation by 2035 and to move the US energy economy to “net zero” CO2 emissions by 2050. This $2 trillion plan would provide financial incentives for a variety of programs, but would compel private investments and expenditures, through legislation and regulation, an order of magnitude greater. The Biden plan is very similar to elements of the Green New Deal and the Blue / Green New Deal, though the President Elect has not officially adopted either.

The President Elect has taken several inconsistent positions regarding oil and gas exploration on public lands and the use of hydraulic fracturing, at one time stating that he would ban hydraulic fracturing on both public and private lands. The position on oil and gas pipelines has been less clear, but new construction would not likely be encouraged and might be actively opposed. This would be consistent with the efforts of environmental activists and several Democrat controlled states to prevent pipeline construction; and, of several Democrat controlled cities to ban new natural gas services.

There are already indications that “sue and settle” would return to EPA and other federal agencies as an approach to rapidly deploying regulations which might face a long and tortuous path to implementation otherwise.

President Elect Biden has expressed a general willingness to use Executive Orders to reverse the Trump Executive Orders which reversed numerous Executive Orders issued by former President Obama. These Executive Orders could be expected to follow rapidly after his inauguration.

The potential futures for the US energy economy and the overall US economy are clear, but which future will eventuate remains uncertain.

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." -H. L. Mencken

From: Science Direct

By: Bjorn Lomborg

Date: July 2020

Welfare in the 21st century: Increasing development, reducing inequality, the impact of climate change, and the cost of climate policies

"Climate change is real and its impacts are mostly negative, but common portrayals of devastation are unfounded. Scenarios set out under the UN Climate Panel (IPCC) show human welfare will likely increase to 450% of today's welfare over the 21st century. Climate damages will reduce this welfare increase to 434%.

Arguments for devastation typically claim that extreme weather (like droughts, floods, wildfires, and hurricanes) is already worsening because of climate change. This is mostly misleading and inconsistent with the IPCC literature. For instance, the IPCC finds no trend for global hurricane frequency and has low confidence in attribution of changes to human activity, while the US has not seen an increase in landfalling hurricanes since 1900. Global death risk from extreme weather has declined 99% over 100 years and global costs have declined 26% over the last 28 years.

Arguments for devastation typically ignore adaptation, which will reduce vulnerability dramatically. While climate research suggests that fewer but stronger future hurricanes will increase damages, this effect will be countered by richer and more resilient societies. Global cost of hurricanes will likely decline from 0.04% of GDP today to 0.02% in 2100.

Climate-economic research shows that the total cost from untreated climate change is negative but moderate, likely equivalent to a 3.6% reduction in total GDP." ...

Welfare in the 21st century: Increasing development, reducing inequality, the impact of climate change, and the cost of climate policies

“The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men, Gang aft a-gley, And leave us nought but grief and pain, For promised joy.”, Robert Burns

The past year has been a rollercoaster ride for the issue of climate change. The year began with the expectation of an effort to rescind the 2009 EPA Endangerment Finding; and, of expanded hydraulic fracturing supporting continued reductions of US CO2 emissions as natural gas combined cycle power plants replace aging coal generating stations.

The emergence of the COVID19 pandemic in January “sucked all the oxygen out of the room”, refocusing attention from a variety of issues including climate change. Climate activists complained loudly that the focus on their issue had been overwhelmed by the pandemic. A group of approximately 400 media outlets concluded that the climate issue was not receiving sufficient attention to convince the US public that climate change was  a “crisis”, or “emergency” or “existential threat” and began a coordinated effort to provide more intensive coverage.

The US House of Representatives Democrat majority established a Select Committee on the Climate Crisis. The Democrat presidential candidates established positions regarding climate change, many of which drew heavily on the Green New Deal and the Blue Green New Deal. These positions then evolved into the Democrat Platform for the 2020 election; and, into multi-trillion-dollar climate change action plans and commitments to replace fossil fuels for power generation in the US by 2035.

The IPCC proceeded with development of the Sixth Assessment Report and the CMIP6 ensemble of climate models. The IPCC continued its unofficial policy of excluding research results which do not support the IPCC and consensed climate science community narrative. The consensed climate science community also continued its unofficial effort to prevent non-conforming research results from publication in peer reviewed journals. Several of the CMIP6 climate models project even higher temperature anomalies by the end of the century, despite the fact that the CMIP5 models almost universally over-project future temperature anomalies.

Research continued to suggest that the actual climate sensitivity to CO2 was close to, or even below, the lower end of the climate sensitivity range used by the climate models. These research results suggested that climate change is not now, nor is it likely to be, a “crisis”.

Major aspects of the “settled science” remain far from settled, including:

•     differences between near-surface and satellite temperature measurements;
•     differences among various sea surface temperature measurements;
•     differences between tide gauge and satellite sea level rise measurements;
•     differences among the projections of the ensemble of climate models; and,
•     differing positions on the impact of climate change on extreme weather events.

The UNFCCC cancelled its Conference of the Parties 26 because of the COVID pandemic.

The US withdrawal from the Paris Accords became official on November 4th.

The UN Secretary General has called on the leaders of member nations to declare “Climate Emergencies” in their countries.

Numerous organizations have begun calling for restrictions on citizen freedoms like those imposed in response to the COVID19 pandemic to control climate change.

From: The Honest Broker Newsletter

By: Roger Pielke Jr.

Date: November 30, 2020

The Unstoppable Momentum of Outdated Science

Much of climate research is focused on implausible scenarios of the future, but implementing a course correction will be difficult

"A 2015 literature review found almost 900 peer-reviewed studies published on breast cancer using a cell line derived from a breast cancer patient in Texas in 1976. But in 2007 it was confirmed that the cell line that had long been the focus of this research was actually not a breast cancer line, but was instead a skin cancer line. Whoops.

Even worse, from 2008 to 2014 — after the mistaken cell line was conclusively identified — the review identified 247 peer-reviewed articles putatively on breast cancer that were published using the misidentified skin cancer cell line. A cursory search of Google Scholar indicates that studies continue to be published in 2020 mistakenly using the skin cell line in breast cancer research.

The lesson from this experience is that science has momentum, and that momentum can be hard to change, even when obvious and significant flaws are identified."...

The Unstoppable Momentum of Outdated Science

The effect of CO2 in the globe’s atmosphere on global temperature is the result of the absorption of infrared radiation emitted from the surface of the globe toward space. The quantity of radiation emitted by the surface of the globe is finite. CO2 absorbs infrared radiation only in limited portions of the radiation spectrum. As the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increases, the fraction of the radiation in those portions of the spectrum absorbed by CO2 increases, within the limits of the total radiation emitted in those portions of the spectrum. Therefore, as the CO2 concentration increases, the quantity of radiation available to be absorbed by the next increment of CO2 decreases logarithmically, as shown in the graph below.

AMO physicists William van Wijngaarden and William Happer have recently completed an extremely detailed study of radiation absorption by the principal “greenhouse” gases including water vapor (H2O), carbon dioxide (CO2), ozone (O3), nitrous oxide (N2O) and methane (CH4). Their paper has been released as a preprint entitled “Dependence of Earth’s Thermal Radiation on Five Most Abundant Greenhouse Gases”. Their research regarding CO2 determined that the wavelengths at which CO2 absorbs radiation from the surface of the globe are essentially “saturated”, meaning that the current concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is sufficient to absorb virtually all the radiation emitted at the wavelengths in which CO2 absorbs.

This is an extremely important conclusion, since it indicates that emission of additional CO2 into the atmosphere will have little or no effect on global temperatures, confirming the logarithmic relationship shown in the graph above, but based on far more detailed research. The conclusion confirms that there is no climate “crisis” now and that there would be no climate crisis in the future, regardless of the quantity of additional anthropogenic CO2 emissions.

The conclusions of this study are obviously inconsistent with the consensed climate science community’s narrative and with the political science narrative of the UN and numerous national governments and NGOs. They would be even less consistent with the revised narrative being prepared for the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report and with the projections embodied in the CMIP6 ensemble of climate models.

The authors released the report as a preprint after it was rejected for publication by three peer reviewed journals. These rejections of the work of two renowned scientists recall the efforts of the consensed climate science community to prevent publication of research which does not support the consensus narrative, as revealed in the Climategate emails in 2009 and 2010. It is extremely likely that this research will not be included in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report for the same reason.

It is long since time for the consensed climate science community to transition from defending the narrative to advancing the science. This cannot occur in an atmosphere in which serious scientific research is ignored or worse buried. The consensed climate science community is aware of the weaknesses of its narrative and the public is becoming increasingly aware as well, due to the history of failed predictions of imminent calamity.

From: Climate Etc.

By: Andy West

Date: November 19, 2020

Cultural Motivations for Wind and Solar Renewables Deployment

“For me the question now is, now that we know that renewables can’t save the planet, are we going to keep letting them destroy it?”. – Michael Schellenberger

Introduction

"There have been many technical analyses of Wind and Solar energy, covering a raft of issues from energy density and efficiency, through subsidies and land usage, to maintenance, grid impacts, intermittency and more. The angle examined here is in no way intended to replace such necessary views, whether they lean to the pessimistic or the optimistic or anywhere in-between. Rather, a complementary view is provided regarding an aspect that such technical analyses cannot address, albeit it often features in the conclusions and questions these analyses raise at the end. Right here at Climate Etc, the first of the excellent analyses by ‘Planning Engineer’ (on his retirement revealed to be Russ Schussler, ex-VP of Transmission Planning at Georgia Transmission Corporations), laudably highlighted the limitation of technical analyses with his very first line: “Power System Planners do not have the expertise or knowledge to say whether or not the benefits of reducing carbon emissions are worth the costs. However they should be respected as experts for obtaining a better understanding of what the implications and costs of such programs are.”...

Cultural Motivations for Wind and Solar Renewables Deployment