Greenhouse Gas Theory Trashed in replicated Lab Experiment

by John O'Sullivan

Professor Nahle of Monterrey, Mexico backed by a team of international scientists has faithfully recreated a famous experiment from 1909 to confirm that the greenhouse effect cannot cause global warming.

Astonishingly, the 1909 greenhouse gas experiment first performed by Professor Robert W. Wood at John Hopkins University hadn’t been replicated for a century. This despite over $100 billion spent by the man-made global warming industry trying to prove its case that carbon dioxide is a dangerous atmospheric pollutant.

The analogy had been that greenhouse gases (e.g. CO2) act like the glass in a greenhouse trapping heat in Earth’s atmosphere and if they build up (due to human industrial emissions) the planet would dangerously overheat.

At the Biology Cabinet laboratories Professor Nahle was able to confirm the astounding findings: Wood was right all along. After peer-review the results confirm that the so-called ‘greenhouse effect’ is solely due to the blockage of convective heat transfer within the environment in which it is contained i.e. as in this case, a lab flask.

Indeed, it is the glass of the lab flask (or ‘greenhouse’) that caused the “trapped” radiation all along. The flask (or greenhouse) being what scientists refer to as a ‘closed system’; while Earth’s atmosphere isn’t closed at all but rather open to space allowing heat energy to freely escape.

Nahle’s findings shoot holes in claims of Professor Pratt of Stanford University whose own replication of Wood’s experiment was touted as the first official reconstruction of Wood’s test for a century. Pratt claimed he had disproved Wood’s findings.

“This is the reason that I decided to repeat the experiment of Professor Pratt to either falsify or verify his results and those of Professor Wood,“ says the Mexican professor at the Biology Cabinet.

The Monterrey science research institute also recreated Wood’s test into the effect of longwave infrared radiation trapped inside a greenhouse. Unlike Pratt it found that Wood’s findings were correct, absolutely valid and systematically repeatable. The Bio Cab man affirms, “ the greenhouse effect does not exist as it is described in many didactic books and articles.”

Put simply, one of the aforementioned professors has their reputation perilously on the line and Nahle is gunning for an explanation from his U.S. Rival. A clue to the outcome: Pratt isn't even qualified in science - he's a (warmist) mathematician specializing in computers.

Much more HERE





More global warming propaganda from WWF and Reuters; they find that polar bear cubs can die of hypothermia when hit by storms during long-distance swims

"Climate change is pulling the sea ice out from under polar bears' feet, forcing some to swim longer distances to find food and habitat," said Geoff York of World Wildlife Fund, a co-author of the study....

To gather data, researchers used satellites and tracked 68 polar bear females equipped with GPS collars over six years, from 2004 through 2009, to find occasions when these bears swam more than 30 miles at a time.

There were 50 long-distance swims over those six years, involving 20 polar bears, ranging in distance up to 426 miles and in duration up to 12.7 days, according to a paper for presentation on Tuesday at the International Bear Association Conference in Ottawa, Canada.

At the time the collars were put on, 11 of the polar bears that swam long distances had young cubs; five of those polar bear mothers lost their cubs during the swim, representing a 45 percent mortality rate, the study found.

Cubs that didn't have to swim long distances with their mothers had an 18 percent mortality rate, the study said....

"They're a lot like us," York said in a telephone interview. "They can't close off their nasal passages in rough waters. So for old bears or young bears alike, if they're out in open water and a storm hits, they're going to have a tough time surviving." ...

"Young bears don't have very much fat and therefore they aren't very well insulated and cannot cope with being in cold water for very long," Amstrup said in the same telephone conversation.

1. It looks like this study was carefully set up in an attempt to find drowning polar bears for propaganda purposes, but from their perspective, it was a failure.
After studying 68 adult females over six years, apparently zero of the adults drowned, but they did document that polar bears can swim for 426 miles and/or 12.7 days!

2. I'm not convinced that even the five missing cubs actually died during the swims. They don't tell us that the cubs were very young during the swims; how do we know that one or more of the uncollared-but-missing cubs didn't survive? Out of 11 total swimming cubs, the difference between a 45% and 18% "normal" mortality rate is only three total cubs.

3. How do we actually know that "more" polar bear cubs die as Arctic ice melts? What percent of polar bear cubs died when swimming one hundred, one thousand, or ten thousand years ago? How do we know that carbon dioxide made these bears decide to swim?

SOURCE




Switching off airconditioners kills

Heatstroke deaths quadruple as Japan shuns air conditioners

Deaths from heatstroke quadrupled in the early part of summer as temperatures rose and air conditioners were switched off in line with government appeals to curb electricity usage to avoid power blackouts.

From June 1 to 10, 26 people died from heatstroke, compared with six in the same period last year, according to the Fire and Disaster Management Agency. The number of people taken by ambulance to hospitals for heatstroke more than tripled to 12,973, with 48 percent in the most-at-risk group aged 65 years or older.

"There's a risk the number of patients will continue to rise if people stop using air conditioners at home," said Yasufumi Miyake, associate professor at Showa University Hospital, who led a nationwide study of heatstroke. "Elderly people are the most vulnerable as they try to tough it out."

Temperatures in eastern Japan, including Tokyo, were 3.8 degrees higher than the 30-year average in the last 10 days of June and the highest since at least 1961, according to Hajime Takayama, a forecaster at the Meteorological Agency. The average temperature in Tokyo in the 10 days was 26.4 degrees, and temperatures in the coming weeks are forecast to be above average, he said.

Japan has shut 35 of its 54 atomic reactors for safety checks after the March 11 earthquake triggered the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl, reducing total power capacity by 11 percent. Conservation efforts amid hotter temperatures are raising concern of a repeat of last year, when a record 1,718 people died of heatstroke as the summer heat broke records.

In Yamagata Prefecture, the government asked businesses and families to either switch off air conditioners or raise the temperature settings for two hours between 1 and 3 p.m. on July 7 to conserve power. The government also warned of the risks of heatstroke.

Families were encouraged to stay in one room to cut the number of air conditioners being used and to close their curtains to block sunlight, according to the government website. Consumption on that day dropped 19 percent from a year earlier, exceeding the target of 15 percent, the government said.

"Power-saving also requires sensitivity to heatstroke risk," Prime Minister Naoto Kan said July 8 in the Diet.

Heatstroke is an escalation of heat cramps and heat exhaustion and becomes life-threatening when body temperature reaches 40 degrees or higher, according to the Mayo Clinic's website. It can lead to brain damage, organ failure and death.

More HERE





Romney backpedalling

Mitt Romney says he doesn’t think carbon pollution threatens human health and would not green light EPA climate regulations if he were in the White House.

The GOP presidential candidate signaled the reversal to one of the Obama administration's top environmental policies during a town hall meeting Thursday in Derry, N.H. This came about six weeks after he acknowledged during a campaign stop that global warming is real, a statement that won him praise from Al Gore.

"I think we may have made a mistake," Romney said Thursday in response to a voter's question about EPA regulating air pollution from coal plants under the Clean Air Act. "We have made a mistake is what I believe, in saying that the EPA should regulate carbon emissions. I don’t think that was the intent of the original legislation, and I don’t think carbon is a pollutant in the sense of harming our bodies."

SOURCE





British jobs gone with the wind

Crippling new taxes proposed by Chris Huhne to subsidise green energy could force key employers out of business.

In the film Billy Elliot, a boy strives to be a dancer against the backdrop of the miners’ strike. Now, the place where they filmed it is the focus of another defining industrial struggle, with hundreds of thousands of jobs at stake.

It’s not workers versus management this time: they’re on the same side. It is workers versus wind farms. The enemy is no longer hard, Thatcherite Right-wingers. It is well-intentioned, impeccably progressive environmentalists: the very people, no doubt, shaking “Coal not Dole” collection tins in north London, circa 1984. The battleground now is not coal. It is electricity.

In the Billy Elliot village of Lynemouth, on the North East coast, all the pits have closed. But it is still home to the Rio Tinto Alcan aluminium plant.

In the last few years, the price of aluminium has more than doubled, and there are plenty of customers. Your mountain bike, your drinks can and parts of your Nissan car could well have started out here.

The Lynemouth plant is profitable. It is fairly modern, only 35 years old. It is almost at full production. It is the biggest private employer left in the entire county of Northumberland, contributing £100 million to the local economy.

Yet it is now at serious risk of closure, the first of dozens of potential victims of what one business spokesman calls Britain’s industrial “suicide”.

Last week, the Energy Secretary, Chris Huhne, announced further massive subsidies for wind farms, nuclear and other forms of low-carbon electricity – all part of Chancellor George Osborne’s ambition to make this the “greenest” country in Europe.

There was already going to be a “carbon floor price”, effectively a tax on CO2 emissions, to subsidise wind and other renewables. Now Mr Huhne’s further subsidies will be funded by consumers, through much higher electricity bills.

Lynemouth’s problem is that it is probably the UK’s single largest user of electricity. Producing just one ton of aluminium uses more power than the average family does in 15 years.

The new wind farm taxes will cost Lynemouth £40 million a year, a third of its entire operating costs, effectively wiping out its annual profits. Last month, John McCabe, a spokesman for the company, said it was examining “how we cope with the huge cost implications of incoming legislation. A number of options are being discussed, one of which is the closure of the plant.”

Lynemouth’s 650 workers, and the hundreds of others it supports indirectly, are only the most exposed of the vast number at risk. Britain is still home to huge amounts of energy-intensive heavy industry, employing millions.

But Stan Higgins, chief executive of the North East Process Industry Cluster, which represents the region’s chemical and pharmaceutical companies, says current government energy policies are “suicidal” and could end up destroying entire sectors of manufacturing.

“Four or five years ago [in pharmaceuticals], energy was the twelfth most expensive element of manufacturing a tablet,” he says. “Now it is second or third. “We are trying to be the first country in Europe to introduce [a carbon floor price], but it’s crazy to do this independently. Our energy costs are six to seven per cent higher than the European average and that’s not sustainable.

Most of our big companies are not UK-owned – they have no allegiance to the UK whatever. They will go where they get the best deal. We can compete with the world, but we just need a level playing field.”

Aluminium isn’t even the most energy-intensive manufacture. For the chlorine industry, electricity is up to 70 per cent of its costs. And if British chlorine-making collapses, it takes with it thousands of jobs in other sectors that are wholly dependent on chlorine production. Some people have started talking of a “domino effect”.

Jeremy Nicholson, of the Energy Intensive Users Group, says: “Employment in the sectors that are most directly affected by rising green taxes is 225,000. "And if you look at the Government’s projections, their CO2 proposals will hit even firms that are less electro-intensive – paper, glass, ceramics – with a further 600,000 jobs. Factories may not close immediately, but investment won’t come here.

“The issue for us is the cost of electricity here compared with the rest of the world. Britain has the most ambitious targets for renewable energy growth in Europe and is introducing several measures which will only affect UK users.”

The new green taxes will fund several forms of low-carbon electricity, including nuclear. But it is ministers’ attachment to wind farms, increasingly offshore, that is causing industry the greatest pain.

“We don’t take issue with the need to decarbonise energy,” says Mr Nicholson. “But, for goodness’ sake, let’s do it cost-effectively. Offshore wind is one of the most expensive ways of reducing our carbon emissions, and one of the least cost-effective ways of generating electricity.”

Last week, Mr Huhne scoffed at such claims. But, as is now widely known, wind farms’ biggest problem is that for about three-quarters of the time, the wind does not blow at the right speed to turn the turbines.

Electricity cannot be stored – you have to generate it at the moment you need it – and the wind might not oblige when 10 million viewers want to switch the kettle on at the end of Coronation Street. So, at the same time as building new wind farms, you must build new conventional power stations as backup.

The Government does not include the costs of building these backup stations in its figures for wind. Nor does it include the cost of the thousands of miles of extra powerlines needed to collect electricity from wind farms, much more widely scattered than conventional power plants.

The Renewable Energy Foundation (REF) and The Sunday Telegraph asked Colin Gibson, former power network director at the National Grid, for an estimate that takes into account these production costs.

His figures suggest that across its whole life, onshore wind will cost as much as £178 per megawatt hour of electricity generated, three times nuclear (£60). Offshore wind, with its much higher construction cost, is more than four times dearer, at £254 per megawatt hour.

Mr Gibson stresses that, though most of his calculations are based on official data, some have to be based on his best judgment, and aren’t definitive. But the broad picture is clear. “If you take the costs of a mixture of on and offshore wind, it is very roughly £140 per megawatt hour higher than a mixture of nuclear and gas turbines,” he says.

“Multiply that by the number of megawatt hours we use, and you get a figure in the order of maybe £11 billion a year, which is about £550 per customer per annum [extra] for wind power. That is quite frightening.”

Until now, the main controversy about electricity prices has been to do with consumers. Last week, new figures showed that rising bills have driven another 700,000 people into “fuel poverty”. But the impact on manufacturing could deliver a double whammy: not only costing you money, but also costing you your job.

John Constable, director of the REF, says: “The emphasis on expensive and uncontrollable renewables such as wind, when there are better and cheaper alternatives that could do the same job, is discrediting the green agenda. We are loading very heavy burdens onto viable industries in order to subsidise immature and costly energy technologies.”

“This is a major threat to the UK,” warns Nicholson. “I sometimes think that the Department for Climate Change doesn’t care if we de-industrialise Britain, so long as we meet our climate targets.”

SOURCE





We love prophecies but are unwise to believe them

The most interesting thing I’ve read all year about the climate-change debate is a book that has nothing directly to do with it.

Dan Gardner’s Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail and Why We Believe Them Anyway explores, well, the title pretty sums it up. Gardner runs through a laundry list of culture-shaping fears and hopes and points out that they were almost always wrong.

Capitalism didn’t end up on the ash heap of history. World War I didn’t turn out to be the war to end all wars. Society wasn’t plunged into anarchy by the Y2K bug. The nightmare scenario of overpopulation Malthusians have been banging on about since 1798 is yet to play out.

That’s despite the likes of Paul Ehrlich (the Al Gore of the ‘70s) predicting in 1968 that: “The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundred of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

It’s 2011, and somehow I still don¹t have a robot maid to clean my house or a jetpack to fly me to work.

There are solid evolutionary reasons humans are desperate to know what is likely to be coming around the corner. And there’s a class of experts who make good coin by pandering to our desperate need to glimpse the future. The only problem with this arrangement is that the experts almost never deliver on their side of the bargain.

In 1984, The Economist asked four former finance ministers, four chairmen of multinational companies, four Oxford economics students and four London dustmen to provide a 10-year forecast of what was going to happen to things like inflation, unemployment and oil prices.

A decade on, it was discovered that while nobody¹s predictions had been particularly accurate, the garbos had done as well as the corporate chairmen and considerably better than the students or former finance ministers.

The likely reason the garbologists did better than the economists probably relates to what might be labelled the paradox of prognostication. Those humble types who accept the future is very difficult to predict do much better at forecasting it than those who are supremely confident of their seer-like capabilities - usually because they’re in thrall to One Big Idea That Explains Everything.

Guess which type of expert is most likely to get media attention, research funding and political backing?

Of course, given the marketplace of ideas is filled to bursting with predictions of mankind’s imminent doom, if some course of action is or isn’t taken, there’s still the issue of which apocalypse you choose to fear.

More here


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