"We cannot rule out..."

The paper below looks into the much touted "runaway" greenhouse effect and concludes that it is not likely until billions of years into the future. But to remain safe from vengeful Warmists, the authors say "We cannot rule out" such an effect happening sooner.

I cannot rule out the possibility that some of the hardcore Warmists will one day admit to their fraud but I would be foolish to plan on it.

And the paper commits a scientific howler about Venus. The high surface temperature on Venus is predictable as an adiabatic effect. It is caused by the great weight of the huge Venusian atmosphere. Invoking a greenhouse effect is unparsimonious

The ultimate climate emergency is a "runaway greenhouse": a hot and water vapour rich atmosphere limits the emission of thermal radiation to space, causing runaway warming. Warming ceases only once the surface reaches ~1400K and emits radiation in the near-infrared, where water is not a good greenhouse gas. This would evaporate the entire ocean and exterminate all planetary life. Venus experienced a runaway greenhouse in the past, and we expect that Earth will in around 2 billion years as solar luminosity increases. But could we bring on such a catastrophe prematurely, by our current climate-altering activities? Here we review what is known about the runaway greenhouse to answer this question, describing the various limits on outgoing radiation and how climate will evolve between these. The good news is that almost all lines of evidence lead us to believe that is unlikely to be possible, even in principle, to trigger full a runaway greenhouse by addition of non-condensible greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. However, our understanding of the dynamics, thermodynamics, radiative transfer and cloud physics of hot and steamy atmospheres is weak. We cannot therefore completely rule out the possibility that human actions might cause a transition, if not to full runaway, then at least to a much warmer climate state than the present one. High climate sensitivity might provide a warning. If we, or more likely our remote descendants, are threatened with a runaway greenhouse then geoengineering to reflect sunlight might be life's only hope

SOURCE

Lubos Motl also has a laugh at this paper






An Inconsistent Truth

Phil Valentine advises:

An Inconsistent Truth Official Movie Trailer. The movie they don't want you to see:



Also, a humorous deleted scene




Tom Nelson has got a strong stomach. He is reading all of the ClimateGate 2.0 emails

He comments:

For a while, I was looking at the ClimateGate 2.0 emails by searching them for certain names and keywords.

Now, my plan is to read all 5,349 of them at this link. I didn't want to start at #1, so I started at #5000, read to the end, then went back to 4,000. I'm currently about 1,000 emails into this project. If you don't want to read a lot of ClimateGate email excerpts, you might want to avoid this blog for a while. I can't wait to see what's in the next 4,300 emails.

So far, it's been fascinating to get a look at the climate hoax from the inside. The data fudging, the demonization of doubters, the knee-jerk rejection of alternate hypotheses, the quest for funding, the travel to exotic locations, the pal review, the left-wing politics, the fear of debate, the swagger in the early days, then the panic as the skeptics closed in--it's all there.

Another thing I've learned is that Michael Mann is evidently vastly smarter than me, because while it'll take me months to finish all of these emails, he finished up his stellar analysis back on Day 1.

SOURCE




Yes, all that snow in Alaska really is due to low temperatures

Anchorage, Alaska is having record snow this year. Through the first fourteen days of January, the average dew point in Anchorage has been -17C, which corresponds to a specific humidity of 1.2 grams/m³.

Gizan, Saudi Arabia has received no precipitation this year, and has had an average dew point of 21C, which corresponds to a specific humidity of 19.8 grams/m³.

Gizan has 16 times as much water vapour in the air, but hasn’t had a single drop of rain. By contrast, Anchorage has seen almost continuous snow, despite much lower amounts of water vapour.

Those who claim that the snow in Alaska is due to excess humidity, are either grossly incompetent or grossly dishonest. The snow is due to record cold temperatures, which is causing the small amount of moisture in the air to saturate and precipitate.

SOURCE (See the original for links)





New study: People with better knowledge of science are more likely to be sceptical of global warming

A new study by the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School has produced a result that its authors want to hide:

"People with better knowledge of science and stronger reasoning skills are more likely to be skeptical of climate change than people with lower levels of comprehension".

This is without doubt the most importantant finding in the new study, but because it does not fit into the warmist authors´ agenda, they choose to bury it in a heap of sociological gobbledygook:

See: "The Tragedy of the Risk-Perception Commons: Culture Conflict, Rationality Conflict, and Climate Change"

SOURCE (See the original for links)





US Republicans stir transatlantic tensions over climate change

Concerns are growing in Brussels that persistent denial of human-caused global warming among Republican presidential hopefuls could damage EU-US relations and even spark a trade conflict.

All the leading challengers for the White House have staked out positions on global warming that defy the international scientific consensus, causing what Thomas Legge, a climate officer for the German Marshall Fund, called “exasperation” in Brussels.

Climate Action Commissioner Connie Hedegaard said in September she was “shocked that the political debate in the US is so far away from the scientific facts.” [What facts? Global warming is a prophecy, not a fact] “When you hear American presidential candidates denying climate change, it's difficult to take,” she said.

If a Republican president disrupted the EU's inclusion of aviation in the EU’s Emissions Trading System, or its default values ascribed to oil from tar sands, Jo Leinen, the chair of the European Parliament’s environment committee, called for “a reaction that would affect transatlantic trade.”

“In order to have a fair competition between our industries and theirs, we could talk about broader measures against materials from the US with high energy intensity or output of climate gases like steel, metals, and chemical products,” he told EurActiv.

This could take the form of “a CO2 levy or tax on the border to compensate for the [low carbon] investments in products made in Europe,” he said. [And what if the USA retaliated by putting a complete embargo on the importation of European wines and motor vehicles? That would not hurt the USA significantly but French winemakers and German carmakers would screech loudly enough to be heard even in Brussels! Those two industries are sacrosanct to the countries concerned so losing a major market for them would hurt so badly that a rapid backpedalling would ensue]

Rather than continue with current EU-US relations, Leinen proposed a move by the EU to “orient itself towards a coalition with China.”

But Sarah Ludford, the Liberal vice-chair of the EU’s delegation for relations with the United States, disagreed with trade sanctions, while conceding that Republican positions were “a long way from the mainstream of European thinking”.

“As a free-trader, I am always a little bit wary of trade linkages,” she said by telephone from London. “I understand where Jo Leinen is coming from but I would tread with caution as you can descend into a tit-for-tat situation that carries considerable dangers.”

“I hope that Obama wins the election and we get a more moderate and encouraging position from the US administration,” she added, speaking in a personal capacity.

Ironically, the ‘cap and trade’ idea that underwrites the global carbon market was originally the brainchild of US Republicans. But this changed because of what one senior US climate negotiator at Kyoto described as a collection of “toxic” ingredients.

“There are three issues – constraining industry, sending money abroad, and strengthening the UN – that are inflammatory on their own right,” Nigel Purvis, a State Department official under the Clinton and Bush administrations, said on the phone from Washington.

More than that, the climate change issue had become a symbol of ‘big government’ for Republicans, Purvis argued, and this had been amplified by “an enormous amount of campaign finance contributions and political advertising” paid for by the fossil fuel industry, and some trades-unions.

The UN climate chief Christiana Figueres has said leadership changes in the US and elsewhere should not undermine progress towards setting up a globally binding climate deal by 2015, as set down in the roadmap at the recent global climate summit in Durban, South Africa.

However, Republican party presidential contenders may disagree with Figueres' analysis.

Rick Santorum has described global warming as “a liberal conspiracy” for government control, based on “junk science”. Mitt Romney argues that the origins of climate change are unknown, and little should be spent on countering it.

Ron Paul has called global warming “the greatest hoax… in hundreds of years”, while Rick Perry described it as a “contrived phony mess that is falling apart under its own weight”. Newt Gingrich has recanted past support for climate action.

SOURCE

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