Fossil fuels to the rescue

Fossil fuels to the rescue! A liberal discovers the value of natural gas and fracking.

The arguments for converting the U.S. economy to wind, solar and biomass energy have collapsed. The date of depletion of fossil fuels has been pushed back into the future by centuries — or millennia. The abundance and geographic diversity of fossil fuels made possible by technology in time will reduce the dependence of the U.S. on particular foreign energy exporters, eliminating the national security argument for renewable energy. And if the worst-case scenarios for climate change were plausible, then the most effective way to avert catastrophic global warming would be the rapid expansion of nuclear power, not over-complicated schemes worthy of Rube Goldberg or Wile E. Coyote to carpet the world’s deserts and prairies with solar panels and wind farms that would provide only intermittent energy from weak and diffuse sources.

IPCC announces reforms for next report

The IPCC announced this week it has established new procedures in an effort to avoid the problems that occurred with the last report.

I remain very skeptical of these reforms, as well as anything this UN organization publishes. Consider this quote for example:

On the issue of citing non-peer-reviewed literature, such as reports from nongovernmental organizations and climate activists, the new procedures say that IPCC report authors can include such documents “as long as they are scientifically and technically valid. [emphasis mine]

How convenient. Decide that something written by Greenpeace is “scientifically and technically valid” and you can use it as evidence.

The science remains uncertain

Two papers published this week by the American Geophysical Union once again indicate that the science of climate change remains exceedingly uncertain. More significantly, the models that try to predict the future of the Earth’s climate continue to appear unreliable, with such large margins of error that it is at this time foolish to make any policy based on their predictions.

diagram of Atlantic currents

The first paper took a close look at the deep water currents in the Atlantic to see if it could track changes to what the authors’ call the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), more generally referred to as the Atlantic conveyor belt. This conveyor belt begins with the sinking of salty dense water in the northeast Atlantic off of Europe and Africa. The deep water current then travels south and into the Indian and Pacific Oceans where it comes to the surface only to flow back to the Atlantic, traveling north along the coast of North America as the Gulf Stream, bringing with it the warm temperatures that make Europe’s climate much warmer than its latitude would normally suggest.

According to most global warming models, higher temperatures should cause the glaciers in the Arctic and Greenland to melt, thereby pouring an increased amount of fresh water into the North Atlantic. This infusion of fresh water is then expected to lower the salinity and density of the Atlantic water, thus preventing it from sinking and thus acting to slow the conveyor belt, and possibly even causing it to shut down. The consequence would be no more Gulf Stream to warm the climate of Europe.

In other words: Disaster! Death! Destruction! All caused by global warming!

Unfortunately for these global warming models, the paper above found no trend at all. The conveyor belt is not slowing, as predicted. To quote the paper’s abstract:
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Earth Day predictions from 1970

The predictions of disaster from the first Earth Day, 1970. I especially like this one:

Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions. . . . By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.” Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University [emphasis mine]

A consensus was reached and the science was settled!

Remember this the next time some blowhard global-warming pundit tries to claim “the science is settled” today.

Hot time on the ol’ Sun tonight!

After literally years of inactivity, well below all initial predictions, the Sun truly came to life this past month. Below is the March monthly update of the Sun’s sunspot cycle, published by NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center. The red curve is the prediction, while the dotted black line shows the actual activity.

As you can see, the Sun’s sunspot activity shot up precipitously. Though I don’t have the data from past years, the March jump appears to me to probably be one of the fastest monthly rises ever recorded.

Does this mean the newest prediction from the solar scientists at the Marshall Space Flight Center calling for a weak solar maximum in 2013 is wrong? Probably not, though of course in this young field who knows? I would say, however, that the overall trend of the data still suggests the next maximum will be very weak.

Stay tuned! The next few months should finally give us a sense of where the next maximum is heading.

March Sunspot graph

“Worldwide-temperature increase has not produced acceleration of global sea level over the past 100 years”

From Watts Up With That: New sea level data shows that there has been “no acceleration of global sea level over the past 100 years,” despite the increase in temperatures. Key quote from the paper:

It is essential that investigations continue to address why this worldwide-temperature increase has not produced acceleration of global sea level over the past 100 years, and indeed why global sea level has possibly decelerated for at least the last 80 years.

A real scientist shows why the “hide the decline” crowd are frauds

Below is a video excerpt from a lecture by Richard A. Muller, a scientist at the University of California at Berkeley. He illustrates forcefully and clearly why frauds like Michael Mann, Phil Jones, and anyone who excuses the climategate scandal are not to be trusted with science. Or as he says,

I now have a list of people whose papers I won’t read anymore.

It is imperative that more scientists come forward like this and condemn these guys, as Muller does. Only then, can climate research begin to recover its reputation.

Random variations are still too large for climate models

The uncertainty of science: a paper published today in Geophysical Research Letters has concluded that the the long term random variations of the climate, sometimes lasting as long as three or four decades, are large enough to hide any actual changes to the climate. In the quote from the abstract below, the term “random walk” is jargon for a long term random fluctuation having nothing to do with climate change.

This result indicates that the shorter records may not totally capture the random variability of climate relevant on the time scale of civilizations, for which the random walk length is likely to be about 30 years. For this random walk length, the observed standard deviations of maximum temperature and minimum temperature yield respective expected maximum excursions on land of 1.4 and 2.3°C and over the ocean of 0.5 and 0.7°C, which are substantial fractions of the global warming signal.

In other words, it might simply be too soon to be making predictions about the climate, based upon the presently available data.

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