Open Thread
July 7, 2017
By Paul Homewood
36 Comments
Comments are closed.
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. – J Robert Oppenheimer.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Lots of revelations this week from all warming is due to temp data tampering. M Mann about to be sanctioned by the court for contempt, to 97% consensus is crumbling. It sure makes a difference when you elect the right people. It looks like light at the end of the tunnel. So is it time for predictions? I say they won’t abandon climate change and will morph it to some other scheme that is irrelevant and costly to the poor so the rich make even more money. How about asteroid protection? The moon was in the news for meteor strikes recently. It would only take a few scientists whipping the flames to hyperventilate another hysteria, a hysteria where we must protect the planet from space a true unknown.
That is the major problem with Climate Change, it has data to disprove it.
You think we shouldn’t be worried, but but but…
“Every day, Earth is bombarded with more than 100 tons of dust and sand-sized particles.
About once a year, an automobile-sized asteroid hits Earth’s atmosphere, creates an impressive fireball, and burns up before reaching the surface.
Every 2,000 years or so, a meteoroid the size of a football field hits Earth and causes significant damage to the area.”
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/asteroids/overview/fastfacts.html
They need to work on this, but you may be on to something.
How about we fix it….
Every day, Earth is bombarded with more than 100 tons … of asteroids!
Almost every year, an automobile-sized asteroid nearly hits Earth!
And creates an impressive fireball!
Every 2,000 years or so, a meteoroid the size of a football field hits Earth and causes significant damage to the area! And the last one was over 2000 years ago!! Imagine if it hit (name your city)!!!
Send money to my address to research the problem!! Urgently!!!!
While well-paid fear mongers endlessly proclaim doom from Man-Made CO2, we pay little attention to its benefits to humanity and all living things:
http://www.carbonfolly.com/2017/07/07/greening-of-the-earth/
And it might even make it a bit warmer – better yet – although that’s yet to be seen.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”
H.L. Mencken
What more need be said about climate change?
This Open Thread is quite fortuitous. Today I was listening to a podcast of Melvyn Bragg’s “In Our Time” which covered the PETM. Some was quite interesting but as expected from the start the cause of the temperature rise was put down to “Carbon” in the form of CO2 and Methane. I’ve had a quick look on the web and most articles use the increase in “Carbon” as the sole cause. One of the contributors did throw in a few caveats about the global temperature being considerably warmer then and the configuration of the continents being significantly different.
What I would like to read is a more open minded study, for instance despite the “global temperature” reaching 30’C there was no tipping point and in geological timescales there was a rapid return to lower “global temperatures”. Why?
Are there any studies of the PETM which aren’t trying to prove than we’re driving the Earth’s Climate into another PETM and look at the evidence with a neutral eye?
Those researchers who believe in AGW, and those who just accept the view current in the staff common room, will only look at ‘carbon’ as the cause. Personally I regard the dangerous emissions from the Siberian Traps to have been sulphur oxides. Both the dioxide and trioxide form far stronger acids (sulphuric in the latter case) than CO2 and are far more likely to cause ocean acidification than CO2.
As sulphate particles in the air they could cause global cooling, and there is apparently some evidence of a short (80-100,000 years) ice age. Further if they reacted with iron pyrites and released substantional amounts of sulphide that could contribute to anoxia in the oceans blamed for the massive species extinction.
Are you reading Mike Benton or the more cautious Douglas Erwin?
Thanks for the reply.
I’ve not read anything much about the PETM. I was only aware of the step change at the Paleocene–Eocene boundary. Until I listened to the podcast yesterday, I don’t know when the original broadcast was, I wasn’t aware of just what an effect it had.
What little research I have done since confirms a very high temperature spike of about 100K years, extinctions and the opportunity for mammals to have a huge increase in variety.
What I found puzzling was that in 100K years migration to the poles and diversification had all happened. What my research has shown is that after the spike had finished the global temperature continued its increase until temperatures were as high or higher than the peak of the PETM and then started to decline. The actual period of hig temperatures after the PETM was about 8-10 million years. That fits better with species diversification in a much larger habitable area. It just raises why after things returned to normal temperatures continued to rise for at least another 3 million years in what is known as the Eocene optimum. So the PETM was followed by rising temperatures in the Eocene Optimum at 10’C above today’s perfect conditions all very strange.
Any sources of non-alarmist analysis would be useful
Looks like the global mean surface temperature anomaly (GMSTA) may be trying to settle back down to levels seen in the summer of 2014, before the last intense El Niño. Below is today’s graph of the daily GMSTA since 2014 as estimated from the US Global Forecast System (GFS) initial conditions run four times a day and provided by the University of Maine Climate Change Institute (UM CCI).
Below is a closer look at the daily estimates for the last year, along with the running 365-day mean and the 7-day GFS forecast (at end in red):
The forecast has been bouncing around up and down from run to run, mainly influenced by large changes and forecast uncertainty in the Antarctic region. So I don’t have much confidence in the forecast beyond a day or two. However, the GMSTA estimates have been running well below the running 365-day mean and well below a year ago at this time, causing the 365-day running mean to continue to decline. It will be interesting to see how the remainder of the years trends out.
It’s interesting that the term ‘global warming’ has been replaced in the popular press by ‘climate change’. If you ask anyone what ‘global warming’ means, they will mostly give you an obvious answer on the lines of ‘the world is getting hotter’. Try asking the same people what they understand by ‘climate change’ and I guarantee that you will obtain a different answer from every one. I think I would call that deliberate global obfuscation!
I think that anyone who is a proponent of “climate change”, should be asked precisely what they mean by the term. Also, does their belief originate from their own experience, or something they have been told is climate change. Most of the time they are talking about weather, or even things which are not even anything to do with climate.
Precisely the question I’ve put to my MP, particularly as she has been made up to Climate Change Minister! Of course, she is fully signed up to the new religion.
Nobody believes in CAGW any more; today we discuss “Climate Change”. You have to love the brilliance of this re-branding…….who could dissent with the idea that climate will change?
Someone rang up BBC’s Newswatch, complaining that the Stephen Hawkins interview, in which he said that the Earth was “close to a tipping point where global warming was irreversible” and that President Trump’s actions could “push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus”, should have been given more prominence on the news, in view of the fact that it meant the end of the world.
I couldn’t work out whether the chap was serious or being sarcastic.
Down in OZ the Met caught out again modifying temps by Jennifer Mahorrasy.
Then we have claims that the familes of windmill builders in China are living in extremely pollution caused by these same builders.
Finally the the 50% renewable target in South Australia which has now won the title of most expensive electricity in the world, when they can get it.
“Finally the the 50% renewable target in South Australia which has now won the title of most expensive electricity in the world, when they can get it”
For many years we’ve had TV series broadcast in the UK following families who’ve decided to “Make a new life in Australia”. I wonder how long before they start another show for those poor unfortunates who’ve decided to come back…
We are riding on the BIG SHIP called ‘Nature’ as it makes its headway against entropy. Mostly we do not know the direction and speed it is heading but from history we gain many insights into the most probable direction and rate. Warm periods, like ‘Nature’ is taking us through now are always followed by cooler ones, sometimes very cold ones.
This big ship is powered by processes that in the main involve the transforming of solar energy into chemical structures, with CO2 and water as the main fuel. And humans are part of this powerful matrix. This ship ‘Nature’ at it’s simplest is a CO2+H2O+sunlight transformer powering its way into the future.
The speed and direction of the transformation are carefully controlled by powerful, but loosely coupled, feedback mechanisms and this ensures that ‘Nature’ proceeds in its orderly pace in the direction it understands.
Now here’s the problem, some people think that our petty output of CO2 (about a 0.000001 changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations) is driving the ship off course and at a rate ‘Nature’ can not handle. What they fail to understand is that ‘Nature’ runs all of the inboard engines and processes in full feedback mode, humans may be pushing a little old CO2 back into the ship, but that is like adding a little outboard motor on to the side of a huge powerful and well controlled ocean liner. The ship will still go where steered and at the speed it wants, the little outboard effectively does nothing to threaten this as all inboard processes and feedbacks will make allowances for the outboard motor’s minute effect. In fact human releases of CO2 may even enhance ‘Natures’ ability to cope with any of the storms (terrestrial, solar, or stellar) that occur.
We all should learn to stop feeling guilty about our good fortune, and learn to enjoy these glorious warm times, or else we are no better than living on a lifeless Mars.
forgot the graphic —
On another topic. This is an interview on Radio New Zealand.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/thiswayup/audio/201850262/weather-bugs-microbes-making-rain
Brent Christner University of Florida.
How to make GISS temperature record look better —
Lol. I’ve used a similar version before and of course it’s brutal as it puts the whole narrative in context and is utterly embarrassing for alarmists. Throw in a sarcastic ‘the devastation of global warming in all its horror…’ and alarmists explode with fury. On that point, isn’t it time we actually took so-called global warming in the correct context of shifts in temps of a fraction of a degree? That’s all that’s actually happened.
Throughout the week the BBC has been telling us that climate change was going to be a major obstacle at the G20 meeting in Hamburg – and that we should expect a clash between Chancellor Merkel and President Trump over the latter’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement.
But there’s been no such clash nor any sign of climate even being a priority. Indeed, national leaders seem hardly to have mentioned the subject. Maybe that’s because nine of them are from countries classified as “developing” (Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and South Korea) and the Paris Agreement exempts such countries, responsible for over 65% of global emissions, from any obligation – legal or moral – to reduce those emissions: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0958305X16675524 and https://ipccreport.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/cop-21-developing-countries-_-2.pdf. Moreover, two developed countries – Japan and Russia – clearly have little interest in emission reduction. Therefore, as the US has changed its position, it would seem that, of G20 members, only Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and the UK regard climate change as a serious problem. Yet they are responsible for only 8% of global GHG emissions: http://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/overview.php?v=CO2ts_pc1990-2015.
In other words, if climate and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is a key issue, the Paris Agreement is not the answer and the US decision to withdraw is not the problem. Maybe Trump’s suggestion that the deal be renegotiated is what should really have been on the G20 agenda.
I’d love to know how South Korea can be classed as a “Developing Country”? They had fibre optic broadband years before we did, and make a lot of the worlds ships, as well as having a successful motor industry…
Its per capita emissions are twice those of the UK. And, since 1990, its emissions have increased by 129% whereas the UK’s have reduced by 31%. It’s completely absurd.
PS: the per capita emissions of China, Saudi Arabia and South Africa are all greater than those of the UK.
Well, the Hamburg meeting is over and the “G20 Leaders’ Declaration” has been published: LINK
Regarding the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement it says this:
And goes on to say:
In other words, following the US withdrawal, there will be no renegotiation and Canada, Australia and Europe will bear the entire burden of emission reduction and funding transfer while powerful “developing” countries are let completely off the hook.
That Western governments should willingly put their heads in this noose is beyond comprehension.
Re “The principle of common but differentiated responsibilities“, I’m reminded of Professor David Campbell’s comment:
LINK
I weep for my countrymen. It is not just the Beeb that is full of alarmist nonsense:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2017/07/stephen-hawking-flies-off-the-scientific-reservation/
I have sent an email to Pallab Ghosh, asking him why he did not challenge Prof. Hawkins on this and sending him a link to the the Roy Spencer article.
I have also suggested that he arranges an interview with Roy Spencer, and broadcasts it on the BBC, to put the record straight.
I don’t expect a reply.
So where is this?
http://www.the-star.co.ke/sites/default/files/styles/new_full_content/public/1591146.jpg?itok=0XVuK6cO
Europe last December — NO
South America now — NO
Australia now — NO
It’s Nyahururu in Kenya on 4th July 2017!
http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/2017/07/04/photo-residents-abuzz-after-snowfall-in-nyahururu_c1591143
HEY BBC some news for you!
Don’t get conned. EON trying to force smart meters on cusomers!
‘Smart meter roll-out: is getting one still compulsory? ‘
“…..E.On, the energy giant, has written to customers to tell them that old meters are being “phased out” and suggesting that they must have a smart meter installed. A call centre worker also told a customer that the Government would soon be making smart meters mandatory – an incorrect claim…….”
.”….When Telegraph Money asked if the company was “phasing out” old meters, we were told: “As and when traditional meters come up for replacement, we seek to replace them with smart meters. But it is not compulsory for customers to have smart meters fitted……”
“…..This newspaper has reported extensively on customers’ problems with smart meters, including a compatibility error that means those who switch providers find themselves needing a replacement smart meter.
Data from ElectraLink, the energy market research company, shows that almost 23,000 smart meters have been replaced after becoming inoperable following a change of provider…..”
And a nice little threat from EON – “A spokesman warned that in the future customers with old-style meters could miss out on special energy tariffs…..”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/bills-and-utilities/gas-electric/smart-meter-roll-out-getting-one-still-compulsory/
“E.On, the energy giant, has written to customers to tell them that old meters are being “phased out””
I haven’t received one (yet) – maybe they’ve remembered the strongly worded letter I sent them a couple of years back (by recorded delivery)…
I’ve had one, it came earlier this week. I have left it in the capable custody of our shredder.
‘And a nice little threat from EON – “A spokesman warned that in the future customers with old-style meters could miss out on special energy tariffs…..”
Do they mean the compulsory increase in energy costs whenever the power provider decides ?
IMVHO they will seek to control supply by increasing tariffs during peak times. Many moons ago Steve Holliday as head of National Grid said we should expect our energy supply to become ‘exclusive’. I.e not always available to everybody at all times. I suggested National Grid might be better served with a ‘can do’ CEO, rather than one happy with a ‘can’t do’ mentality.
I hope this photo can be seen with the link. Otherwise I apologize for wasting your time. It shows the cocktail party at G20 with a bunch of vacant looking attendees standing behind Donald Trump who is seated at the table reading something. There is the grinning Trudeau. This picture is worth a thousand words.
For any who do not know, Donald Trump does not drink.
Yaaaa. Sometimes, in science, you just have to experiment. Experiment a success.
I wonder if they were taken on an eco-tour at some point to marvel at the amazing array of wind turbines that dot the N bank of the Elbe estuary? We motorsailed past them a couple of days ago and I lost count in the murk at 300. Probably not I suspect, as I videoed just one of them turning during our (overall) 6hr passage upstream towards the Kiel Canal.