New model of global temperature is highly explanatory without Warmist assumptions

This should spark a revolution in climate science but it will of course be ignored.  I have long said that the surface temperature of the planets is explainable as degree of insolation plus an adiabatic effect and nothing more.  Good to see that rigorously demonstrated

New Insights on the Physical Nature of the Atmospheric Greenhouse Effect Deduced from an Empirical Planetary Temperature Model

Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller

Abstract

A recent study has revealed that the Earth’s natural atmospheric greenhouse effect is around 90 K or about 2.7 times stronger than assumed for the past 40 years. A thermal enhancement of such a magnitude cannot be explained with the observed amount of outgoing infrared long-wave radiation absorbed by the atmosphere (i.e. = 158 W m-2), thus requiring a re-examination of the underlying Greenhouse theory.

We present here a new investigation into the physical nature of the atmospheric thermal effect using a novel empirical approach toward predicting the Global Mean Annual near-surface equilibrium Temperature (GMAT) of rocky planets with diverse atmospheres. Our method utilizes Dimensional Analysis (DA) applied to a vetted set of observed data from six celestial bodies representing a broad range of physical environments in our Solar System, i.e. Venus, Earth, the Moon, Mars, Titan (a moon of Saturn), and Triton (a moon of Neptune).

Twelve relationships (models) suggested by DA are explored via non-linear regression analyses that involve dimensionless products comprised of solar irradiance, greenhouse-gas partial pressure/density and total atmospheric pressure/density as forcing variables, and two temperature ratios as dependent variables.

One non-linear regression model is found to statistically outperform the rest by a wide margin. Our analysis revealed that GMATs of rocky planets with tangible atmospheres and a negligible geothermal surface heating can accurately be predicted over a broad range of conditions using only two forcing variables: top-of-the-atmosphere solar irradiance and total surface atmospheric pressure. The hereto discovered interplanetary pressure-temperature relationship is shown to be statistically robust while describing a smooth physical continuum without climatic tipping points.

This continuum fully explains the recently discovered 90 K thermal effect of Earth’s atmosphere. The new model displays characteristics of an emergent macro-level thermodynamic relationship heretofore unbeknown to science that has important theoretical implications.

A key entailment from the model is that the atmospheric ‘greenhouse effect’ currently viewed as a radiative phenomenon is in fact an adiabatic (pressure-induced) thermal enhancement analogous to compression heating and independent of atmospheric composition.

Consequently, the global down-welling long-wave flux presently assumed to drive Earth’s surface warming appears to be a product of the air temperature set by solar heating and atmospheric pressure. In other words, the so-called ‘greenhouse back radiation’ is globally a result of the atmospheric thermal effect rather than a cause for it.

Our empirical model has also fundamental implications for the role of oceans, water vapour, and planetary albedo in global climate. Since produced by a rigorous attempt to describe planetary temperatures in the context of a cosmic continuum using an objective analysis of vetted observations from across the Solar System, these findings call for a paradigm shift in our understanding of the atmospheric ‘greenhouse effect’ as a fundamental property of climate.

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Wind Turbines Are Not Clean Or Green And Provide Zero Global Energy

The wind turbine industry is a shell game where all three shells are empty; it is the biggest scam of the millennium and destined to fail miserably in the end. Technocrats promote initiatives that are designed to impose social control, not social benefits

The Global Wind Energy Council recently released its latest report, excitedly boasting that ‘the proliferation of wind energy into the global power market continues at a furious pace, after it was revealed that more than 54 gigawatts of clean renewable wind power was installed across the global market last year’.

You may have got the impression from announcements like that, and from the obligatory pictures of wind turbines in any BBC story or airport advert about energy, that wind power is making a big contribution to world energy today. You would be wrong. Its contribution is still, after decades — nay centuries — of development, trivial to the point of irrelevance.

Here’s a quiz; no conferring. To the nearest whole number, what percentage of the world’s energy consumption was supplied by wind power in 2014, the last year for which there are reliable figures? Was it 20 per cent, 10 per cent or 5 per cent? None of the above: it was 0 per cent. That is to say, to the nearest whole number, there is still no wind power on Earth.

Even put together, wind and photovoltaic solar are supplying less than 1 per cent of global energy demand. From the International Energy Agency’s 2016 Key Renewables Trends, we can see that wind provided 0.46 per cent of global energy consumption in 2014, and solar and tide combined provided 0.35 per cent. Remember this is total energy, not just electricity, which is less than a fifth of all final energy, the rest being the solid, gaseous, and liquid fuels that do the heavy lifting for heat, transport and industry.

Such numbers are not hard to find, but they don’t figure prominently in reports on energy derived from the unreliables lobby (solar and wind). Their trick is to hide behind the statement that close to 14 per cent of the world’s energy is renewable, with the implication that this is wind and solar. In fact the vast majority — three quarters — is biomass (mainly wood), and a very large part of that is ‘traditional biomass’; sticks and logs and dung burned by the poor in their homes to cook with. Those people need that energy, but they pay a big price in health problems caused by smoke inhalation.

Even in rich countries playing with subsidised wind and solar, a huge slug of their renewable energy comes from wood and hydro, the reliable renewables. Meanwhile, world energy demand has been growing at about 2 per cent a year for nearly 40 years. Between 2013 and 2014, again using International Energy Agency data, it grew by just under 2,000 terawatt-hours.

If wind turbines were to supply all of that growth but no more, how many would need to be built each year? The answer is nearly 350,000, since a two-megawatt turbine can produce about 0.005 terawatt-hours per annum. That’s one-and-a-half times as many as have been built in the world since governments started pouring consumer funds into this so-called industry in the early 2000s.

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The Appalling Delusion of 100 Percent Renewables, Exposed

The National Academy of Science refutes Mark Jacobson’s dream that our economy can run exclusively on ‘green’ energy..  

The idea that the U.S. economy can be run solely with renewable energy — a claim that leftist politicians, environmentalists, and climate activists have endlessly promoted — has always been a fool’s errand. And on Monday, the National Academy of Sciences published a blockbuster paper by an all-star group of American scientists that says exactly that.

The paper, by Chris Clack, formerly with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Colorado Boulder, and 20 other top scientists, appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It decimates the work of Mark Jacobson, the Stanford engineering professor whose wildly exaggerated claims about the economic and technical viability of a 100 percent renewable-energy system has made him a celebrity (he appeared on David Letterman’s show in 2013) and the hero of Sierra Clubbers, Bernie Sanders, and Hollywood movie stars, including Leonardo DiCaprio

Jacobson became the darling of the green Left even though his work was based on Enron accounting, alternative facts, and technology hopium. Nevertheless, his claims were politically popular, and his academic papers routinely sailed through peer review. In 2015, Jacobson published a paper, co-written with Mark Delucchi, a research engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper, which claimed to offer “a low-cost solution to the grid reliability problem” with 100 percent renewables, went on to win the Cozzarelli Prize, an annual award handed out by the National Academy. A Stanford website said that Jacobson’s paper was one of six chosen by “the editorial board of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences from the more than 3,000 research articles published in the journal in 2015.” The fact that the National Academy would bestow such a prestigious award on such weak scholarship greatly embarrass the Academy, which gets 85 percent of its funding from the federal government.

In their scathing takedown of Jacobson, Clack and his co-authors — who include Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution, Dan Kammen of the University of California, Berkeley, former EPA Science Advisory Board chairman Granger Morgan, and Jane Long of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory — concluded that Jacobson’s 2015 paper contained “numerous shortcomings and errors.” The paper used “invalid modeling tools, contained modeling errors, and made implausible and inadequately supported assumptions.” Those errors “render it unreliable as a guide about the likely cost, technical reliability, or feasibility of a 100 percent wind, solar, and hydroelectric power system.”

Among the biggest errors — and one that should force the Academy to withdraw Jacobson’s 2015 paper — is that Jacobson and Delucchi overstated by roughly a factor of ten the ability of the United States to increase its hydropower output. Furthermore, the paper ignores two key issues: electricity storage and land use. Jacobson claimed that the U.S. can store energy underground or store it in the form of hydrogen. Clack and his co-authors wrote that “there are no electric storage systems available today that can affordably and dependably store the vast amounts of energy needed over weeks to reliably satisfy demand using expanded wind and solar power generation alone.”

But the most obvious flaw in Jacobson’s scheme involves his years-long refusal to admit the massive amount of land his proposal would require; his myriad acolytes have repeated his nonsensical claims. For instance, last year, Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org and one of America’s highest-profile climate activists, wrote an August 2016 cover story for The New Republic in which he lauded Jacobson’s work and repeated Jacobson’s erroneous claim that his all-renewable program would need only “about four-tenths of one percent of America’s landmass.”

Clack et al. correct the record by pointing out that Jacobson’s scheme would require “nearly 500,000 square kilometers, which is roughly 6 percent of the continental United States, and more than 1,500 square meters of land for wind turbines for each American.” In other words, Clack found that Jacobson understated the amount of land needed for his all-renewable dystopia by a factor of 15. But even that understates the amount of territory needed. Jacobson’s plan requires nearly 2.5 terawatts (2.5 trillion watts) of wind-energy capacity, with the majority of that amount onshore. The Department of Energy has repeatedly stated that the footprint of wind energy, known as its capacity density, is 3 watts per square meter. And so 2.5 trillion watts divided by 3 watts per square meter equals 833 billion square meters (or 833,000 square kilometers): That’s a territory nearly twice the size of California.

The idea of using two California-size pieces of territory — and covering them with hundreds of thousands of wind turbines — is absurd on its face. And yet, Jacobson’s 100 percent renewable scenario has become energy gospel among left-leaning politicians. For instance, in January, New York governor Andrew Cuomo touted his renewable-energy goals and declared that his state was not going to stop “until we reach 100 percent renewable because that’s what a sustainable New York is really all about.”

In February, 54 Massachusetts lawmakers — representing more than a quarter of the members of the state legislature — signed on to a bill that would require the Bay State to get 100 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2050. The bill (S. 1849) says that the goal is to “ultimately eliminate our use of fossil fuels and other polluting and dangerous forms of energy.”

In April, U.S. Senators Jeff Merkley (D., Ore.), Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), Edward J. Markey (D., Mass.), and Cory Booker (D., N.J.) introduced the 100 by ’50 Act, which calls on the United States to be completely free of fossil fuels by 2050. The bill, available here, is a laundry list of terrible ideas, including a “carbon duty” on any foreign-made goods that are made by energy-intensive industries. And as is standard with all-renewable promoters, the bill doesn’t contain a single mention of the word “nuclear” even though some of the world’s highest-profile climate scientists, including James Hansen, have said nuclear must be included in any effort to reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions. The 100 by ’50 legislation was — of course — endorsed by a who’s who of all-renewable cultists, including actor Mark Ruffalo; Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club; and May Boeve, the executive director of 350.org.

Jacobson’s response to the Clack paper (and to the ensuing Twitter storm attacking his work) would have made Captain Queeg proud. He has claimed, among other things, that his paper contains no errors; that Clack and the other authors are simply shilling for the nuclear and hydrocarbon sectors; and that the Department of Energy’s capacity data on wind energy (3 watts per square meter) is wrong and that, instead, the figure should be 9 watts per square meter.

The late David J. C. MacKay, a physics professor at the University of Cambridge, would have been horrified. In 2008, MacKay published Sustainable Energy — wthout the Hot Air, one of the first academic books to look at the land-use impacts of renewables. MacKay, who recognized that nuclear must be part of any effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, also calculated that wind energy needs about 700 times more land to produce the same amount of energy as a fracking site. Three years ago, shortly before his death at age 46 from cancer, MacKay talked with British author and writer Mark Lynas about his work. During that interview, MacKay called the idea of relying solely on renewables an “appalling delusion.”

The punch line here is clear: The Clack paper proves that it’s well past time for the green Left and their political allies to quit claiming that we don’t need hydrocarbons or nuclear energy. Alas, it appears they prefer appalling delusions about renewables to real science and simple math.

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The Bank of England is enslaved by green groupthink

What happens to its projections when the taxpayers of the world tire of being milked to subsidise renewables?

James Delingpole

I find it odd that I’m so often having to write about the science of global warming, species extinction and ocean acidification because, though I’ve certainly acquired a pretty useful base knowledge over the years — superior, I’m guessing, to 97 per cent of scientists — it’s really not my main interest. What fascinates me far more is the way the faddish preoccupations of a few green cultists have somehow come to dominate our entire culture, corrupting the intellectual current, suborning institutions, crushing dissent — much as Marxist, fascist and Nazi ideologies did in the 20th century, only with rather more widespread success.

Let me give you a recent example of this: an article from the June Quarterly Bulletin of the Bank of England, titled ‘The Bank’s response to climate change’. Nothing wrong with the premise: it is indeed part of the Bank’s statutory duty to ‘identify, monitor and take action to remove or reduce risks that threaten the resilience of the UK financial system’. The problem, argues energy editor John Constable in a critique for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, is the inexcusably one-sided way in which the bank has handled it.

The report’s focus is directed almost entirely towards the risks posed by fossil fuels. So we learn lots about the droughts, floods and storms that may be caused by ‘man-made climate change’. And also — a popular campaign theme with the Guardian and Greenpeace, this one — that the world’s remaining fossil fuel reserves (coal, oil, gas, etc) may have to be left in the ground as ‘stranded assets’, unusable because of the damage that burning them will supposedly do to the planet.

But we don’t hear about the more plausible and immediate economic risks posed by renewables. The most obvious one is what will happen if taxpayers around the world tire of being milked to subsidise bird-frazzling solar arrays, bat-chomping eco-crucifixes, river-polluting anaerobic digesters, electric cars whose batteries alone create more CO2 during manufacture than a petrol car does in eight years, and suchlike, and the Potemkin industry that is renewables comes crashing to a sudden halt?

It’s not as if clever people haven’t considered this possibility. Warren Buffett once frankly admitted that the only reason for building wind farms was for the ‘tax credits’ And though it’s true that most western economies from the EU to Australia and Canada are now run by administrations broadly in favour of such green crony capitalism, the gravy train may not trundle on for ever. Look at what is now happening in the US under their new president.

I really don’t expect people who write reports for the Quarterly Bulletin of the Bank of England to share my politics. What I do expect is that people in such important positions should do their actual job. If this report was on, say, the insights of Stormzy, the comparative merits of Stilton and Roquefort, or whether the jam or the clotted cream should go first on a scone, it would, of course, be deeply annoying if they got it wrong. But it would not, I submit, be as socially, economically and politically damaging as one which will influence central bank policy in the world’s fifth largest economy.

Consider the repercussions when the Bank of England fails, as here, to do its due diligence: pension funds misallocate their investments; governments and green campaigners alike weave ‘experts at the Bank of England’ into their propaganda and policy justifications; public debate is distracted from serious issues by chimeras; businesses either misdirect their investments or simply give up the fight and jump on the band-wagon; financial journalists who should know better become unthinking mouthpieces for the climate industrial complex; City departments, from human resources to compliance and marketing, devise new ways to entrench environmental correctness into their philosophy; law firms wonder if there’s any money to be made suing firms that haven’t factored in the relevant risks.

When the Bank of England sneezes, in other words, the whole world catches a cold. (In the private sector there are heavy penalties for producing such false prospectuses. You wonder why similar rules don’t apply to our public institutions.) And the only reason we don’t get more angry about it is that most of the time we don’t know it’s going on.

I’m racking my brain to think which newspaper in these dumbed-down, brainwashed times would take a piece critiquing a Bank of England report on climate change resilience. None, obviously, because it’s too esoteric and anyway, the media doesn’t like to rock the boat — either because it subscribes to the official narrative or because it’s sick of fending off vexatious Ipso complaints from green ideologues and climate industry stooges. So the result is that false information on climate change — it would be branded ‘fake news’ if it came from the right — is freely disseminated, is largely unchallenged, and becomes widely accepted fact.

Think of this, next time you chat about climate change to someone who must know what they’re talking about because they’re a high powered financier/a City lawyer/a senior oil industry executive/an actual scientist/a university professor. Likely their opinions will not be borne of personal investigation, but rather will come from simply having taken on trust an official narrative which it would be more than their job’s worth to challenge even if they felt the urge.

This is the nature of groupthink and there’s hardly an institution in the western world which isn’t a prisoner of it. Such a pity that those few of us holding the keys to the cell doors are treated like pariahs.

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‘I won’t be lectured by grumpy old white men’, says leading Australian Greenie

Racism, sexism and ageism all in one sentence.  The bigotry on the Green/Left bubbles to the surface

Greens leader Richard Di Natale defended Sarah Hanson-Young’s decision to take her daughter on a $4000 taxpayer funded whale watching excursion, but refused three times to answer whether the trip passed the “pub test”.

This morning, Senator Hanson-Young told the ABC to “cry me a river” after a high-profile presenter accused her of “reverse racism” for describing critics of her taxpayer-funded whale watching trip as “grumpy old white men”.

The South Australian senator has been dogged by controversy after The Australian on Monday revealed she and her daughter took an overnight trip to the Great Australian Bight in September to “see the whales” at a cost to taxpayers of $3874.23.

She defiantly declared yesterday she had no regrets about the trip and had no choice but to take her 11 year-old daughter, who she said was “sick” at the time.

She sparked a further backlash among voters by telling Sky News on Tuesday her critics were “grumpy old white men deciding what is best for my family”.

The senator did not breach any parliamentary travel rules.

This morning, during her weekly appearance on an ABC radio panel alongside fellow SA senators Penny Wong and Simon Birmingham, she was challenged over the racist nature of her comments by host David Bevan.

“That’s an interesting choice of words — ‘grumpy old white men’ — by her,” Bevan told listeners of Adelaide’s top-rating breakfast radio show.

“Why the language? Why are you talking about grumpy old white men?

“You wouldn’t put up with that language if somebody was talking about an old grumpy black man, would you?

“You hear this language (about white men) a lot. We heard it when we went to a conference in Sydney in the ABC where they were talking about old pale males — this is a reverse racism, it’s getting around, isn’t it?”

But a defiant Senator Hanson-Young was immediately dismissive, saying “oh, cry me a river, I mean, seriously.

“When you have got some big bloke standing up telling people how to be a mother, what’s good for my daughter, I am not going to stand there and take it, and I am going to hit back, and that’s what I did.”

Bevan responded: “And you hit back using racial terms”.

Senator Hanson-Young said, “these people who want to complain and tell me what is good for my daughter, how to look after her and what my job is as a mother and how I manage that as a senator, I am not going to take it.

“I am not going to resile from doing my job as a senator ... and hearing men like Cory Bernardi tell me how to be a mother, how to manage my family affairs.”

Labor Senator Penny Wong, who was on the ABC panel with Senator Hanson-Young, said the term “grumpy old white men” was “not the language I would use”.

“A public figure would not use that language,” Senator Wong said.

“I have made clear over many years in public life that I do not use language around race in the way you’ve just described.”

But pressed as to why she would make the “personal decision” not to use such language, Senator Wong repeatedly refused to provide an explanation, telling Bevan, “I am not getting into this”.

Senator Birmingham, who also was on the ABC radio panel, said he would not use the racially charged language chosen by Senator Hanson-Young.

“My approach is always to deal with issues before us, do it in a straight way,” he said.

“I don’t really think age or colour or gender or sex or sexuality or religion or any of those matters are really relevant points.”

Senator Hanson-Young this morning on ABC radio also appeared to change her story, claiming she wasn’t on a “whale-watching” trip, despite posting photos of herself and her daughter undertaking a whale watching tour and telling The Australian on Sunday that the “whole point” of the trip was “see the whales”.

The senator, who wants a ban on oil and gas exploration in the Bight, said she had a range of meetings with stakeholders over two days.

“I did see the whales at the head of the Bight, invited on there by the local indigenous people, they were lobbying me for money to build a new eco-tourism hub ... there was no whale watching holiday,” she said.

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