ENTREPRENUERIAL INGENUITY DEVISES NEW TECHNOLOGY TO CUT ENERGY REQUIREMENTS

Pulsar Advanced Technologies has announced will next week launch its lead product, the Vulcanus MK4, a water heater USING microwave technology to heat water on demand. This technology with super-heating capabilities will drastically cut energy costs and totally eliminate the need to store hot water. The Vulcanus MK4 is making its world premier at Construct Canada in Toronto between Nov. 30 and Dec. 2.

The tankless system uses microwave technology to heat water on demand, saving energy and providing an endless supply of hot water for residential and commercial usage. The technology is designed to eliminate the deadly Legionella Pneumophila, since water will not stagnate, as it does with conventional hot water heaters.

Powered by electricity and unaffected by the volatile gas markets, the Vulcanus MK4 can heat water from 35 degrees Fahrenheit to 140 degrees Fahrenheit in seconds and can source multiple applications at once: showers, dishwasher, sink usages and more. The Vulcanus MK4 is the size of a stereo speaker with a sleek modern look, making it ideal for condos and apartments, while powerful enough to serve the needs of any size family.


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GULF STREAM SAFE IF WIND BLOWS AND EARTHS TURNS

(From Nature 428, 601, April 8, 2004)

Sir - Your News story "Gulf Stream probed for early warnings of system failure" (Nature 427, 769 (2004)) discusses what the climate in the south of England would be like "without the Gulf Stream." Sadly, this phrase has been seen far too often, usually in newspapers concerned with the unlikely possibility of a new ice-age in Britain triggered by the loss of the Gulf Stream.

European readers should be reassured that the Gulf Stream's existence is a consequence of the large-scale wind system over the North Atlantic Ocean, and of the nature of fluid motion on a rotating planet. The only way to produce an ocean circulation without a Gulf Stream is either to turn off the wind system, or to stop the Earth's rotation, or both.

Real questions exist about conceivable changes in the ocean circulation and its climate consequences. However, such discussions are not helped by hyperbole and alarmism. The occurrence of a climate state without the Gulf Stream anytime soon - within tens of millions of years - has a probability of little more than zero.

Carl Wunsch
(Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)




ICE GROWTH IN THE GREENHOUSE DEBUNKED

(From Geoscience Canada, June, 2004)

By Andrew J. Weaver and Claude Hillaire-Marcel

ABSTRACT

The recent IPCC (2001) assessment stated that

"Most models show weakening of the Northern Hemisphere Thermohaline Circulation (THC), which contributes to a reduction of surface warming in the northern North Atlantic. Even in models where the THC weakens, there is still a warming over Europe due to increased greenhouse gases."

However, there is still a widespread misunderstanding of the possible consequence of climate change on the Atlantic Ocean Meridional Overturning. In particular, it is often touted, especially in the media, that a possible consequence of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions is: "the onset of the next ice age". Here we document the history of this misconception and quantitatively show how it is impossible for an ice age to ensue as a consequence of global warming. Through analysis of the paleoclimate record as well as a number of climate model simulations, we also suggest that it is very unlikely that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning will cease to be active in the near future. We further suggest that a region where intermediate water formation may shut down is in the Labrador Sea, although this has more minor consequences for climate than if deep water formation in the Nordic Seas were to cease.

[...]

CONCLUSIONS

While much has been made in the media of global warming potentially leading to the onset of the next ice age, we believe we have shown that this is simply not possible. A more relevant question is what will happen to the AMO during the course of the next century. Some models assessed in IPCC (2001) find no reduction of the AMO during the 21st century while others find a slight reduction in its strength. Such a reduction leads to a negative feedback to anthropogenic warming in and around the North Atlantic. That is, through reducing the transport of heat from low to high latitudes, SSTs are cooler than they would otherwise be if the AMO was left unchanged. As such, warming is reduced over and downstream of the North Atlantic. It is important to note that in all models where the AMO weakens, warming still occurs downstream over Europe. While admittedly model-dependent, even in the case where we added an additional external freshwater perturbation to the North Atlantic for 500 years, whose magnitude was chosen to account for the upper estimate of the observed rate of global sea level rise this past century, we still do not get a cessation of the AMO and cooling down stream over Europe.

Worth mentioning here is the fact that the most sophisticated non flux-adjusted model of Wood et al. (1999) suggests that the freshening of North Atlantic surface waters presently observed (Curry et al., 2003) could be associated with an increasing AMO (Wu et al., 2004). This same model, praised by Rahmstorf (1999) as giving "for the first time a realistic simulation of the large scale ocean currents", also suggests that eventually it is only Labrador Sea Water formation that is susceptible to a collapse as it did during the most recent warmer episodes of the Earth Climate history (Hillaire-Marcel et al., 2001).

Climate change is offering decision makers and society as a whole many important challenges that need to be assessed and addressed, including the possibility of a reduction in the strength of the AMO or the very remote possibility of its cessation this century. One thing that they need not concern themselves with is Global Warming causing the onset of the next ice age. Unfortunately, such a conclusion is far less newsworthy than the one warning of the occurrence of an impending ice agc.




WILL FRESHENING OF THE NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN SLOW THE GULF STREAM AND COOL EUROPE?

(From CO2 Science Magazine, 18 February 2004)

Summary of:
Wu, P., Wood, R. and Stott, P. 2004. Does the recent freshening trend in the North Atlantic indicate a weakening thermohaline circulation? Geophysical Research Letters 31.

Background:
"It is widely expected," according to the authors of this new model study, "that global warming would intensify the hydrological cycle, with more evaporation in the tropics and more rainfall in polar regions," and that "such a changed freshwater balance will impose a fresh water flux forcing to the ocean's surface and alter the large scale ocean density structure, which consequently cause the THC [thermohaline circulation] in the global oceans to slow down." As a result of this hypothetical scenario, many climate alarmists are claiming that CO2-induced global warming will slow the flow of the Gulf Stream, causing it to provide less heat to Europe and plunging the continent into a new Little Ice Age that ultimately leads to all sorts of political tensions around the globe. In fact, the purveyors of this scare scenario have become so strident in promoting it that even the U.S. Pentagon's strategic planners are said to be grappling with its implications (Stipp, 2004).

What was done:
Noting that a freshening of the North Atlantic Ocean has in fact been observed by Dickson et al. (2002) and Curry et al. (2003), the trio of scientists from the UK's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research "analyzed a set of four model simulations under historical natural (solar irradiance and volcanic aerosol changes) and anthropogenic (greenhouse gases, sulphate aerosol and ozone changes) forcings," which they say "have successfully simulated 20th century global mean temperature variations."

What was learned:
An ensemble of four simulations carried out with the Hadley Centre's coupled climate model HadCM3 successfully reproduced the systematic freshening of the deep North Atlantic Ocean that has been observed over the past four decades. "However," as Wu et al. report, they "do not find a decreasing trend of the North Atlantic THC." Quite to the contrary, they say that "accompanying the freshening trend, the THC unexpectedly shows an upward trend, rather than a downward trend."

What it means:
As a result of their analysis, the Hadley Centre scientists conclude that the observed freshening trend of the North Atlantic Ocean "does not seem to be consistent with an anthropogenically forced climate change scenario." And to be sure we get the import of their message, they reiterate a few sentences later that their analysis "does not seem to support an interpretation of the observed freshening trend as an early signal of climate change due to human activities." In addition, we would further note that with no slowdown of the THC, and maybe even an increase in its flow rate, the Gulf Stream should continue to keep Europe significantly warmer than what its latitude would suggest as far into the future as we can reasonably claim to see.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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