Tag: environmentalism

China fails to reduce its methane coal mine emissions

10:11 am

Surprise, surprise! Using satellite data, a new study has now shown that China has not only failed to reduce its methane coal mine emissions, it has allowed those emissions to increase.

China, already the world’s leading emitter of human-caused greenhouse gases, continues to pump increasing amounts of climate-changing methane into the atmosphere despite tough new regulations on gas releases from its coal mines, a study shows.

China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of coal, which accounts for approximately 72 percent of the country’s electricity generation. While data show that coal production has increased in China, it has been unclear until now much methane gas, or CH4, has increased. Methane that is released during coal mining is responsible for the majority of coal-related CH4 emissions and is likely the largest human-caused CH4 source in China.

“Our study indicates that, at least in terms of methane emissions, China’s government is talking the talk, but has not been able to walk the walk,” says Scot Miller, an assistant professor of environmental health and engineering and of earth and planetary sciences at Johns Hopkins University.

The truth is that while China might say it has imposed “tough new regulations,” its commitment under the Paris climate accords actually allowed it to increase its emissions significantly for years to come, even as those same accords required the U.S. to decrease its emissions. This unfair situation, which China has apparently taking full advantage of, is one of the major reasons Trump dumped the accords. It also illustrates how little the Paris Accords had to do with climate change. Its real goal was to shift the balance of power and wealth from the U.S. to other countries.

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The absolute uncertainty of climate science

12:02 pm

Even as the United States is being plunged right now into an epic cold spell (something that has been happening repeatedly for almost all the winters of the past decade), and politicians continue to rant about the coming doom due to global warming, none of the data allows anyone the right to make any claims about the future global climate, in any direction.

Why do I feel so certain I can make this claim of uncertainty? Because the data simply isn’t there. And where we do have it, it has been tampered with so badly it is no longer very trustworthy. This very well documented post by Tony Heller proves this reality, quite thoroughly.

First, until the late 20th century, we simply do not have good reliable climate data for the southern hemisphere. Any statement by anyone claiming to know with certainty what the global temperature was prior to 1978 (when the first Nimbus climate satellite was launched) should be treated with some skepticism. Take a look at all the graphs Heller posts, all from reputable science sources, all confirming my own essay on this subject from 2015. The only regions where temperatures were thoroughly measured prior to satellite data was in the United States, Europe, and Japan. There are scattered data points elsewhere, but not many, with none in the southern oceans. And while we do have a great deal of proxy data that provides some guidance as to the global temperature prior to the space age, strongly suggesting there was a global warm period around the year 1000 AD, and a global cold period around 1600 AD, this data also has a lot of uncertainty, so it is entirely reasonable to express some skepticism about it.

Second, the data in those well-covered regions have been tampered with extensively, and always in a manner that reinforces the theory of global warming. Actual temperature readings have been adjusted everywhere, always to cool the past and warm the present. As Heller notes,
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Shake-up at half billion dollar government ecology project

9:24 am

Even as the government shutdown continues, the contractor managing a $434 million ecology project has dismissed two project managers and dissolved a 20-member scientific advisory board.

The turmoil is the latest in a long line of woes for NEON, which launched in 2000 and has faced ballooning budgets and allegations of mismanagement by its previous operator. Battelle took over NEON’s operations in 2016 and, in 2018, appointed Collinge, an environmental scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder, as the network’s observatory director and chief scientist. The non-profit also created the 20-member Science, Technology & Education Advisory Committee (STEAC) to advise NEON.

STEAC members credit Battelle with saving NEON, and construction of its observatories is now on schedule. But several see the dismissals and cancellation of the board as a breach of trust with the scientists who hope to use NEON data. “That’s burning bridges, which you just can’t afford to do in a small community,” says Ankur Desai, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

“I understand fully that this is very difficult and emotional for some people,” says Battelle spokesperson Patrick Jarvis. “Our goal remains to develop amazing data products and help the research community understand what’s going on at the broadest ecological level.”

The article includes a lot of whining by scientists about this, but I wonder. I also wonder at this project’s real scientific value. It could be legitimate, with the contractor merely cleaning house to make it run better. Or maybe it’s a boondoggle that is aimed solely at confirming the politically-driven environmental theories of the green activist community. If I had to guess, based on the track record of most big government projects these days, I’d pick the latter.

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Sunspot update December 2018: Decline to solar minimum continues

9:22 am

Time for the monthly solar cycle update! NOAA today posted its monthly update of the solar cycle, covering sunspot activity for December 2018. As I do every month, I am posting it below, annotated to give it some context.

December 2018 sunspot activity

The graph above has been modified to show the predictions of the solar science community. The green curves show the community’s two original predictions from April 2007, with half the scientists predicting a very strong maximum and half predicting a weak one. The red curve is their revised May 2009 prediction.

There really isn’t much to say about the sunspot activity in December. It continued to show a steady decline to solar minimum, exhibiting activity very comparable to what we saw in mid-2008 when the previous unusually long and extended solar minimum began.

One interested detail however: When NOAA issued this graph last month, it finally extended it out beyond the end of 2019 to the end of 2022. In doing so, it also extended out the 2009 prediction of the solar science community, as indicated by the red curve. I hadn’t commented on this last month, but if you look at that curve it drops to zero and then flatlines for the entire year of 2022.

If this is what the solar science community now expects for this upcoming minimum, it means that community is now expecting a record-breaking minimum, lasting far longer than any previous minimum, two to three years at least. It also means that they have not dismissed the possibility that the Sun is about to enter a Grand Minimum, where no significant sunspot activity is seen for literally decades.

Should such a grand minimum occur, it bodes ill for global warming advocates. The track record of the Earth’s climate consistently shows that when sunspot activity declines, the global climate gets colder. Why this happens is not clearly understood, though there is at least one theory backed up by good experimental data. Should this happen, we shall discover that global cooling is a far worse thing to fear than global warming.

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2018 – One Of The Least Extreme Weather Years On Record

12:13 pm

Link here. For the past half decade or so global warming activists both in and out of the climate science community have been pitching the idea, based on literally no evidence, that increased CO2 in the atmosphere would cause an increase in extreme weather events.

The article at the link illustrates how badly that prediction is turning out. In fact, it was clear five years ago that there was no trend visible in the amount of extreme weather events, and that lack of a trend has continued since.

The bottom line remains: The uncertainties in the field of climate science remain gigantic. Our knowledge of how the climate functions remains poor and somewhat limited. And any theory about the consequences of the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere remains tentative and unproven, at best.

Good science is based on cold-hearted skepticism and a recognition of the uncertainties in our knowledge. To be a good scientist you have to strive for intellectual honesty every moment of your life.

For the past two decades the climate science community has decided to abandon these fundamentals, and pushed hard instead to confirm the theory that a trace gas in the atmosphere (carbon dioxide) can cause significant global warming. And they have pushed this theory regardless of the facts. Sometimes they have even pushed this theory despite the facts. Sometimes they have even changed the facts to conform to the theory.

This corruption of scientific principle has harmed the reputation of science badly, and made future work in this field difficult, because much of the data that exists now has been tampered with in ways that make much of it untrustworthy.

Worse, it appears that this is all a terrible indicator of the corruption of our entire society. Everywhere I look, intellectual honesty has been abandoned. Instead, we have become a society of unruly children, picking petty twitter fights based on minor details we pick and choose at our convenience in order to prove our point. Thoughtful consideration of all the facts has become abandoned. And if you try to encourage it, you are called names and blackballed.

Under these circumstances, I do not see a civilized way to recover our society. It seems that very bad times must happen first. Whether we can then recover our civilization afterward remains an open question.

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Why the Drake equation is overrated

5:59 pm

The uncertainty of science: An astrophysicist explains why the Drake equation is useless for predicting the number of alien species in the universe.

While the Drake equation may have spurred the early scientific discussion of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, it doesn’t have much value beyond that. We can’t use to it further our understanding, and we can’t use it to properly guide our thinking. The huge uncertainties in the parameters, the unknown ways those uncertainties mix, and the absolute lack of any guidance in even choosing those parameters robs it of any predictive power. Prediction is at the heart of science. Prediction is what makes an idea useful. And if an idea isn’t useful, why keep it around?

I just wish this same logic was applied to all climate models. They are as useless. Their own huge uncertainties have made them utterly unable to predict anything, for decades. Yet, despite this ongoing failure, vast amounts of research money continues to be poured into the cottage industry that produces them. Worse, too many people in both the intellectual and journalist communities take them far too seriously.

It is a tragedy that is hurting science badly.

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Japan quits global whaling regulatory body

8:41 am

Japan yesterday announced that it is quitting the International Whaling Commission, a global whaling regulatory body founded shortly after World War II to regulate commercial whaling that has instead in recent years attempted to ban all commercial whaling, except for favored native tribes in Russia and the Arctic.

The article’s last few paragraphs provide the real political background to this move by Japan:

An IWC-Japan divorce is the culmination of a wide ideological divide at the commission between ardent anti-whaling nations and countries seeking recognition of limited commercial whaling activities as legitimate. The anti-whaling forces have the upper hand, even though IWC’s expansion has seen more pro-whaling countries joining in recent years.

At the Brazil gathering, Japan had attempted to nudge the IWC toward reforms that would have potentially paved the way for a resumption of commercial whaling. The IWC was initially established to regulate whaling but has enforced an outright moratorium on commercial whaling operations since the 1980s in a desperate bid to prevent the extinction of several whale species. Many whale species have since recovered to a degree, but a few are still considered endangered.

Japan’s reform push was easily voted down. Instead, a majority of IWC members voted to have the commission turn its back on commercial whaling for good. That successful resolution also condemned Japan’s scientific whaling practices, widely regarded as a clandestine commercial operation as Japan’s whaling fleet takes hundreds of whales each year, with the meat ending up in grocery stores and restaurants.

IWC also approved subsistence whale hunts for Arctic aboriginal communities.

The large Japanese delegation at Brazil didn’t hide its frustration. The government accuses IWC members of hypocrisy for allowing culture exemptions from the moratorium for Alaskan and Russian native groups, but not for Japan and Scandinavian whaling cultures.

In other words, this commission has become increasingly political. Rather than focusing on protecting whale populations while allowing whaling by all parties, it has decided to pick and choose who can whale, and has decided to ban Japan while giving others the right to whale.

This political bias is not much different than what was seen at the Paris climate accords. Those agreements put odious restrictions on U.S. commercial activity, while putting no restrictions on China and others. It was this political bias, totally divorced from any sincere effort to reduce CO2 emissions, that prompted Trump to exit that agreement.

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Sunspot update November 2018: Minimum continues

11:26 am

NOAA’s monthly update of the solar cycle, covering sunspot activity for November 2018, was released yesterday. As I have done every month since this website began in July 2011, I am posting it below, annotated to give it some context.

November 2018 sunspot activity

The graph above has been modified to show the predictions of the solar science community. The green curves show the community’s two original predictions from April 2007, with half the scientists predicting a very strong maximum and half predicting a weak one. The red curve is their revised May 2009 prediction.

As I have been expecting now for the last three months, NOAA has finally revised this graph to extend it past the end of 2018. The graph below is the graph from October, which follows the layout and design used since 2007. You can see the differences by comparing the two graphs. In extending the new graph to the end of 2022, they fortunately did not change the design significantly. However, because the new graph has a slightly different scale, I have stretched the green and red curves to make them fit properly. While I suspect the poor quality of the 2007 and 2009 predictions is one reason they do not include them on their graph, I think it essential to add them to better understand the limitations of the science.
» Read more

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Solar scientists: sunspot increase in next solar cycle

7:47 am

The uncertainty of science: Using new computer models, two solar scientists are now predicting that the next solar cycle will begin in about a year and will see an increase in sunspot activity, compared to the weak cycle just ending.

Their ensemble forecast surprisingly suggests it could even be stronger than the cycle which is just ending. They expect the next cycle to start rising in about a year following the end of the current sunspot cycle minimum and peak in 2024. Bhowmik and Nandi predict space environmental conditions over the next decade would be similar or slightly harsher compared to the last decade. They find no evidence of an impending disappearance of sunspot cycles and thus conclude that speculations of an imminent Sun-induced cooling of global climate is very unlikely.

Their conclusion is different than other predictions that are claiming a weak next cycle, or even the beginning of a grand minimum, with no suspots at all. Since an real understanding of the sunspot cycle remains elusive, and all these predictions rely on computer models, it is hard to say which will be right. The advantage this particular prediction has is that their model appears able to match what has happened for the past 100 years.

Stay tuned.

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Scientists to pollute atmosphere to stop global warming

9:27 am

The coming dark age: In order to stop global warming a team of scientists plan a first test of a method designed to block sunlight by injecting aerosols (the scientific term for pollution) into the upper atmosphere.

If all goes as planned, the Harvard team will be the first in the world to move solar geoengineering out of the lab and into the stratosphere, with a project called the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx). The first phase — a US$3-million test involving two flights of a steerable balloon 20 kilometres above the southwest United States — could launch as early as the first half of 2019. Once in place, the experiment would release small plumes of calcium carbonate, each of around 100 grams, roughly equivalent to the amount found in an average bottle of off-the-shelf antacid. The balloon would then turn around to observe how the particles disperse.

The test itself is extremely modest. Dai, whose doctoral work over the past four years has involved building a tabletop device to simulate and measure chemical reactions in the stratosphere in advance of the experiment, does not stress about concerns over such research. “I’m studying a chemical substance,” she says. “It’s not like it’s a nuclear bomb.”

Nevertheless, the experiment will be the first to fly under the banner of solar geoengineering. And so it is under intense scrutiny, including from some environmental groups, who say such efforts are a dangerous distraction from addressing the only permanent solution to climate change: reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. The scientific outcome of SCoPEx doesn’t really matter, says Jim Thomas, co-executive director of the ETC Group, an environmental advocacy organization in Val-David, near Montreal, Canada, that opposes geoengineering: “This is as much an experiment in changing social norms and crossing a line as it is a science experiment.” [emphasis mine]

The number of stupid and ill-documented conclusions mentioned in this article are so many it would be hard to list them all. For one, it assumes the climate is warming in a disastrous manner, an assumption that remains entirely unproven. For another, the last paragraph in the quote above illustrates how much politics dominates this scientific field. Science has nothing to do with this experiment.

Third, the risks involved in doing this kind of geoengineering are impossible to measure. They very easily could be very negative, for us and the environment. Fourth, the only objections to this experiment quoted in the article come from activist groups who believe in global warming, but would rather impose political restrictions on freedom and property rights than do geoengineering. Skepticism of the global warming theory is merely mentioned as an aside, coming from “the occasional conspiracy theorist.”

I could go on. The worst part of this article and the scientists proposing this work is their utter refusal to consider the gigantic amounts of research that has shown the many benefits of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide and warming for agriculture and plant growth. Global warming, should it happen, could have negative consequences, but the data so far is very far from conclusive.

Let me add one more side note: The same environmentalists who generally support geoengineering to halt global warming are also likely to agree with this infantile op-ed: Richard Branson and Elon Musk threaten the purity of space.

Despite all the money the US and Russia have spent attempting to show who has the biggest balls, space remains pure. But, while Nasa re-engages and fuels up for another go, so-called space pioneers and entrepreneurs are already selling seats.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want space to be commercialised, owner [sic] by Richard Branson or Elon Musk. For me, this would ruin something very special.

I’d suggest you read it all, but I would fear your level of education and ability to think will be seriously damaged.

For these anti-human environmentalists, manipulating the Earth’s atmosphere, based on weak scientific theories, is perfectly okay. Having humans and private enterprise in space, however, is evil and must be prevented at all costs.

The empty-headed lack of thought and ignorance required to come to these conclusions, simultaneously, boggles my mind.

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Supreme Court limits government’s attempt steal land for endangered species

11:12 am

The Supreme Court today ruled against the federal government’s attempt to designate private land as a habitat for an endangered species, even though that endangered species doesn’t even inhabit that land.

In a unanimous ruling the justices rejected the federal government’s attempt to designate roughly 1,500 acres in Louisiana as critical space for the dusky gopher frog. “Only the ‘habitat’ of the endangered species is eligible for designation as critical habitat,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in the opinion.

The frog hasn’t lived on the land in five decades, having shifted to neighboring counties. But the government, fearing future events might push the frog back, sought to designate the land, which would have imposed severe restrictions on what the owners could do with it.

Consider the chutzpah of the federal government in attempting to do this. If the court had ruled in their favor, it would have allowed them to designate any piece of property anywhere in the country as a habitat for any species, and thus negate all property rights, forever.

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Scientists admit to many errors in ocean warming paper

2:45 pm

The uncertainty of science: The scientists who wrote a much heralded paper a few weeks ago claiming that the oceans are retaining far more heat than previously believed have admitted that their paper has many errors that make its conclusions far more uncertain.

Scientists behind a major study that claimed the Earth’s oceans are warming faster than previously thought now say their work contained inadvertent errors that made their conclusions seem more certain than they actually are.

Two weeks after the high-profile study was published in the journal Nature, its authors have submitted corrections to the publication. The Scripps Institution of Oceanography, home to several of the researchers involved, also noted the problems in the scientists’ work and corrected a news release on its website, which previously had asserted that the study detailed how the Earth’s oceans “have absorbed 60 percent more heat than previously thought.”

“Unfortunately, we made mistakes here,” said Ralph Keeling, a climate scientist at Scripps, who was a co-author of the study. “I think the main lesson is that you work as fast as you can to fix mistakes when you find them.”

The central problem, according to Keeling, came in how the researchers dealt with the uncertainty in their measurements. As a result, the findings suffer from too much doubt to definitively support the paper’s conclusion about how much heat the oceans have absorbed over time. [emphasis mine]

To put it more bluntly, their conclusions are worthless, the data being too uncertain.

When this paper came out two weeks ago I looked at it, and found myself questioning its results. They seemed too certain. Moreover, their work was too perfect for confirming the theory that the oceans are retaining more heat and thus causing the pause in global warming that no global warming model predicted. It fit the model of most climate research these days, unreliable and unconvincing, which is why I did not post it on Behind the Black.

Now, only two weeks later, we find the researchers backing off from their certain conclusions. If anything is a perfect demonstration of confirmation bias, this story is it. These global warming scientists want desperately to prove their theories, and since their models haven’t been working they are desperately searching everywhere they can for explanations. In this case that search led them astray.

The truth is that maybe the climate field should take a step back and reconsider its entire assumptions about carbon dioxide and global warming. They might actually end up doing better science, and thus do a better job at getting us closer to the truth.

A side note: That this paper passed peer review, and was strongly touted by the media and the science community, illustrates once again how much that media and science community has allowed its biases to cloud its vision. This paper should never have been published with these errors. Period.

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