Another Maunder worth knowing

The Maunder who identified the "Maunder minimum" was Edward Walter Maunder (1851-1928) who while working at The Royal Observatory, Greenwich discovered the dearth of sunspots during the 1650-1700 period. But there is another Maunder still alive who has long been a big wheel in climate studies. Is he related to the previous Maunder? He does not say. But what he does say is well worth noting. I reproduce below most of one of his webpages

The information given on this web page, and the other pages given below, is provided by Dr John Maunder, President of the Commission for Climatology of the World Meteorological Organization from 1989 to 1997, who over the last 55 years has been involved in the "weather business" in various countries, including New Zealand, Australia, Canada, US, Ireland, Switzerland, and the UK , through activities in national weather services, universities and international organizations, and publications including four books : "The Value of the Weather" (1970), "The Uncertainty Business - Risks and Opportunties in Weather and Climate" (1986), "The Human Impact of Climate Uncertainty - Weather Information, Economic Planning, and Business Management " (1989), and the "Dictionary of Global Climate Change" (1994). The information is prepared so as to provide a "need to know" background on climate change, and "global warming" with the aim to promote a better understanding of this complex matter.

Among other things the author was the only New Zealander invited, along with 100 other experts, to the "original" international conference on ".., the role of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in climate variations and associated aspects " held in Villach, Austria in October 1985. The findings of this conference led to the development in 1988 of the Intergovenmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

There are a variety of viewpoints on this subject (covering the full range from those who consider that we ARE the weather makers, to those who consider that we are NOT the weather makers and that climate change is mainly a natural event). I have provided web links to a selection of what I consider to be relevant sites, covering both sides of the story.

1. For a direct link to my web page on "Climate Change: Is "Nature" or "Man" in Control? see

http://sites.google.com/site/climatescience/home

2. For a direct link to my web page on "The Maunder Minimum" ... A second coming? see

http://sites.google.com/site/johnmaunder/the-maunder-minimum-a-second-coming

3. For a direct link to my web page on long-range rainfalls forecasts for New Zealand see

http://sites.google.com/site/johnmaunder/longrangerainfallforecastsfornewzealand

4. For a direct link to my web page on electricity price forecasts in New Zealand see

http://sites.google.com/site/nzelectricitypriceforecasts/home

5, For a direct link to my web site on monthly rainfalls in Tauranga, New Zealand from 1898 to 2010 see

http://sites.google.com/site/nzrainfalls/newzealandmonthlyrainfalls

6. For a direct link to my web site on monthly temperatures in Tauranga, New Zealand from 1913-2010 see

http://sites.google.com/site/johnmaunder/taurangatemperaturedata

For further information please contact Dr John Maunder at climate@ihug.co.nz

SOURCE





Rescue from the Climate Saviors

The Hockey Schtick is honored to present the English release of Rescue from the Climate Saviors, a lay explanation of the physics underlying the fictitious dogma of climate alarmism. KE Research GmbH, a German public policy consultancy firm, prepared the report based on interviews and editing assistance from noted German theoretical physicists Ralf D. Tscheuschner & Gerhard Gerlich, authors of the peer-reviewed paper "Falsification of the Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects within the Frame of Physics", and numerous other German climatologists, physicists, and scientists. KE Research encourages all to freely distribute the report by any means (in unchanged form) and is forwarding copies to all members of the US Senate and House of Representatives, and legislators worldwide.

Conclusions of the report include:

1. The terms “greenhouse effect” and “greenhouse gas” are misnomers and obstruct understanding of the real world.

2. Earth has a natural “cooling system”. If the planet warms, it will automatically raise its cooling power.

3. An increase of earth temperatures is only achievable if the heating power is stepped up: first to “load” matter with more energy (i.e. to raise temperatures) and then to compensate for the increasing cooling, which results from the increase of IR radiation into space.

4. CO2 and other IR-active gases cannot supply any additional heating power to the earth. Therefore, they cannot be a cause of “global warming”. This fact alone disproves the greenhouse doctrine.

5. The “natural greenhouse effect” (increase of earth temperatures by 33°C) is a myth.

6. IR-active gases do not act “like a blanket” but rather “like a sunshade”. They keep a part of the solar energy away from the earth’s surface.

7. IR-active gases cool the earth: 70% of the entire cooling power originates from these molecules. Without these gases in the air, the surface and the air immediately above the ground would heat up more.

8. The notion that a concentration increase of IR-active gases would impede earth’s cooling is impossible given the true mechanisms explained above.

9. As a consequence the very foundation of the “Green Tower of Climate Dogma” crumbles. Computer models alleging to forecast warming based on “greenhouse effects” are worthless, and any speculation about the “impact of climate change” accordingly dispensable.

10. Since the greenhouse hypothesis has been disproven by the laws of physics, it is only a matter of time until the truth becomes public opinion.

SOURCE (See the original for links)





Disproving Man Made Global Warming

by Girma Orssengo, PhD

Does human emission of CO2 cause global warming? This is a scientific question and can be answered using the scientific method with observed global mean temperature data.


A graph of global mean temperature from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia is shown in the above graph

The first period is from 1910 to 1940 & the second period is 60-years latter from 1970 to 2000. After human emission of CO2 for 60-years, the rate of change of global mean temperature of 0.15 deg C per decade from 1970 to 2000 is nearly identical to that of 0.16 deg C per decade from 1910 to 1940. That is, after a 5-times increase in human emission of CO2, there was no increase in the rate of increase of global mean temperature. This data contradicts the theory that human emission of CO2 causes global warming.

In addition, the data shows that the pattern of the global mean temperature is cyclic as shown in the following graph.



This graph shows the following:

1) 30-years of global cooling from 1880 to 1910.
2) 30-years of global warming from 1910 to 1940.
3) 30-years of global cooling from 1940 to 1970.
4) 30-years of global warming from 1970 to 2000.

Based on the above pattern, assuming there is no shift in climate in the coming 20 years compared to the last 130 years, it is reasonable to predict:

5) 30-years of global cooling from 2000 to 2030.

If this prediction is realized then the cyclic nature of global mean temperature will be confirmed. Otherwise, it will be rejected. This will be clear just in the next five to ten years.

If this cyclic nature of global mean temperature is confirmed, this will disprove man made global warming.

SOURCE




Thomas Kuhn And The Catastrophic Climate Paradigm

The past six months has seen a series of unprecedented setbacks for the cause of catastrophic man-made climate change: the collapse of the Kyoto process; the release of incriminating Climategate emails; the discovery of the shoddy standards of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); the mounting evidence that a job-creating green industrial revolution is a fantasy; and the growing suspicion by the public that it has been sold a bill of goods.

The British Royal Society recently released a statement that “Any public perception that the science is somehow fully settled is wholly incorrect,” thus contradicting its own former president, and true believer, Lord May. And if the science isn’t settled, there can hardly ever have been “consensus” on the issue.

A forthcoming paper by Mike Hulme, Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia, from which the Climategate emails emerged, admits that the actual group involved in the “consensus” that “human activities are having a significant influence on the climate” was in fact “only a few dozen,” rather than the thousands invoked by the IPCC.

Last week, economist Richard Tol, one of the IPCC’s own lead authors, suggested that the whole IPCC process should be suspended until the selection of authors has been fixed. This week, the IPCC’s head, Rajendra Pachauri, who has previously accused skeptics of flat Earthism and “voodoo science,” suddenly had a Damascene conversion as to the validity of dissent. “I am not deaf,” he wrote, “to those who do not agree with the scientific consensus on man-made climate change. Nor, indeed, to those who do not agree with the findings — or, in some cases, the existence — of the IPCC.”

But while such newfound humility (even though still embracing bogus “consensus”) is welcome, every country on Earth is still officially committed to catastrophic man-made warming as a reality that demands a draconian policy response. The erection of such a massive commitment on such shaky foundations begs for explanation, and must be put in both a larger political and psychological context.

Hubristic overestimation of human significance — in this case both for doing harm and correcting it by policy — may be the fundamental reason for broad acceptance of man-made climate change theory. The notion that man’s sinful and selfish ways will be punished goes back to the myth of the Flood. In many ways, belief in climate apocalypse reflects similar moralistic disapproval of “materialist” Western society, and the claim that its wealth has been bought at the expense of others, including now that of “future generations.”

This quasi-religious belief is particularly appealing to the political and bureaucratic classes, because it provides new justifications for intervention to correct the imperfections and ongoing inequities of perpetually demonized capitalism. In a classic example of psychological “projection,” however, alarmists claim that it is their opponents who are tainted by “greed” and “self-interest.”

One insufficiently addressed question is why scientists would allow themselves to be recruited to essentially political objectives. Another is why they seem so resolutely committed to increasingly shaky theories, and lash out at critics. Surveys have shown that natural scientists tend to be left-liberal in their leanings. Many perhaps believe that a world with more top-down economic control and greater transfers to poor nations is desirable whatever the realities of climate science, and that given the possibility (however remote) of man-made climate catastrophe, that it is appropriate to adopt the “precautionary principle.”

Such a mindset can be buttressed by the way science is done. In his classic book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn noted that scientific groups adopted, and committed to, “paradigms,” which then became fundamentally unquestionable. That stance was hardened further when moral values, such as being “socially useful,” were involved.

The IPCC came with its moralistic paradigms pre-installed.

Kuhn noted that “professionalization” of any paradigm leads to “an immense restriction of the scientist’s vision and to a considerable resistance to paradigm change.” He even suggested that a scientist, as a captive to a paradigm, is “like the typical character of Orwell’s 1984, the victim of a history rewritten by the powers that be.”

Kuhn also suggested why catastrophic man-made climate change theory — even if it is found to have been greatly exaggerated, or even falsified — will take a good deal of killing. “The transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm,” he wrote, “is a conversion experience that cannot be forced.” The problem is that there is no other clear and simple climate theory to which to be “converted” at the moment.

Kuhn noted that the Earth-centred Ptolemaic system of astronomy, based on elaborately waltzing planets, “worked” for a long time, but eventually became a monster whose complications overwhelmed its usefulness. Then along came Copernicus. The resultant destruction of the Earth-centred universe led to enormous soul-searching, as did Darwin’s vaporizing of the assumption of biological “progress” towards divine ends.

For most modern liberals, including many scientists, the market sun still goes round the government Earth, and it’s a paradigm they are reluctant to change. Policy skeptics, by contrast, who are still trying to establish the revolutionary and counterintuitive insights of Adam Smith, point out that carbon rationing, green industrial strategy and aid transfers under the aegis of “clean development” are — whatever the science — economic junk.

SOURCE





Reality Check: Unstoppable Coal

As the new BP Statistical Review shows, coal, which last year’s report pointed out was the fastest-growing source of energy, was the only major source of fossil fuel energy that didn’t fall last year. It remained flat, while oil and natural gas consumption fell; total primary energy consumption was down 1.1 per cent.

Coal is highly polluting, but also reasonably a cheap and geographically distributed source of energy. Analyst/economist/blogger Gregor MacDonald has written a lot about the world’s increasing use of coal in recent years.

We’ve put together a chart showing that coal - as a proportion of primary energy consumption — is reaching levels not seen for several decades. Since 1971, to be precise:

In fact, as Gregor points out, oil’s share is falling:

Most of it is used for electricity, but with oil production becoming ever more difficult and expensive, the rise of coal raises a somewhat uncomfortable prospect if one believes that demand for transport liquids is relatively inflexible. Transport liquids are also rather difficult to substitute for, in contrast to electricity.

And there does appear to be growing interest in converting coal to liquid fuel (coal-to-liquids or CTL). South Africa is the only existing scale producer of CTL,according to the World Coal Institute. But China is very keen, declaiming its leadership in the field with six projects under development. There are projects planned in Australia and the US.

In the US, a pro-CTL group touts the fuel as a way of improving US energy security. But as environmental group the Natural Resources Defense Fund points out, CTL involves almost double the emissions of conventional oil-derived transport fuel.

SOURCE






Sen. Graham Admits Legislation is Not About Climate

They’re not giving up on more government control of the private sector through “cap and trade” legislation. This much can be derived from recent news coverage. Remarkably, Sen. Lindsey Graham admits that “energy” legislation has nothing to do with the environment; a crucial point that goes missing in coverage

President Obama is using the Deepwater Horizon oil spill as a new rationale for energy legislation that has been stalled on Capitol Hill. The New York Times comes oh, so close to properly informing its readership of the sincere motivations standing behind “cap and trade” schemes in one of its latest reports.

Unfortunately, the newspaper’s enthusiasm for statist policies precludes from asking the right questions where the sleight of hand at work in Washington D.C. is actually quite evident.

The key player here in Sen. Lindsey Graham as he has been working in close concert with Democratic colleagues and Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.). TimesCheck has noted in the past how Graham became the new Republican liberal media darling in light of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) rightward shift. Graham withdrew his support for a repacked “cap and trade” bill after Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) suggested that climate change would take a back seat to immigration.

Until the actual causes of the BP oil spill are exposed and understood, he remains reluctant to reactive “cap and trade” in total but has expressed support for a water down energy bill sponsored by Sen. Joe Lieberman. The Times reports as follows:

“Mr. Graham said that until the causes of the BP oil spill were identified and addressed, he would not vote for any sweeping climate change legislation. Instead, he endorsed a bill introduced last week by Senator Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana, that sets higher fuel economy standards for cars, provides incentives for the development of alternative fuels and imposes stricter efficiency standards on buildings. The Lugar proposal includes no cap on carbon emissions but would seek to reduce greenhouse gas pollution through energy-saving steps.

`I’m not going to take a vote on the floor without a rational policy because we’re in the middle of a major oil spill,” Mr. Graham said. “I’m not going to put that on the table until I find out what happened in the gulf and make sure it doesn’t happen again.’

Mr. Lieberman said the oil spill made it more urgent to enact comprehensive energy and climate change legislation. He acknowledged, however, that the measure he and Mr. Kerry sponsored lacked the votes it needs and would probably be carved up and served in combination with other bills like Mr. Lugar’s.”

But the most important quote from Sen. Graham that deserves mention is left out of the equation. When he asked about his support for an earlier bill the Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Lieberman had co-sponsored, Graham made the following admission:

“It’s not a global warming bill to me,” he said. “Because global warming as a reason to pass legislation doesn’t exist anymore.” He also explained: “There is no bipartisan support for a cap-and-trade bill based on global warming.”

In other words, the overarching purpose here is government control and government regulation as opposed to environmental edification. That’s big news but the point is lost on the liberal news media, which sympathizes with government takeovers of the private sector.

The public should know that the political class was merely using global warming as a duplicitous and misleading rationale to distract away from expensive and intrusive policies. But the tone and direction of the Times report suggests that policymakers maintain noble objectives.

“Images of gushing oil and dying pelicans in the Gulf of Mexico have stirred anger and agony in Washington,” the report says. “But are they enough to prod the Senate to act on long-delayed clean energy and climate change legislation?

“Energy, maybe,” the report continues. “Climate, probably not. There is growing sentiment for a measure that penalizes BP, imposes higher costs and tougher regulations on offshore drillers and takes some steps toward reducing overall energy and petroleum consumption.”

No matter what the rationale, the political class is determined to subtract away from private enterprise and to further burden America’s already beleaguered taxpayers. That’s the story.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here

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