A very angry Belgian

Climatologist Dr. Prof. Jean-Luc Edouard Germain Michel Mélice recently sent the following threatening comment to climate skeptic Marc Morano

Old fart,

You must must remember me...if your brain is not completely fucked...

I am going to write you in french, remember that french is the language of every educated gentleman... which is not your case.

Je suis français et spécialiste en modélisation du climat et des océans, est-tu capable de comprendre ce que j'écris ?

You are getting very old now, your also bald, looking more and more like the Donnie the con, the orange agent.

In fact, you are typically an old mafiosi-type italian immigant.

Of course, you have no scientific training, your brain is to small to understand science, your IQ is under 100 (I have that information).

My scientist friends here in France welcoming you ... with a baseball bat....

Funny, we are all waiting for you if you have the stupid idea to travel to Europe...

I am a NASA expert and travel many times in the USA...I know the addresses of your kids and of of yourself. So, try to be very careful...

Donnie the don is terminated, this will be he case with yourself and the oil industry...

Too bad for you.

Dr. Prof. Jean-Luc Edouard Germain Michel Mélice

He wrote in a similar vein some years ago. See http://antigreen.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-very-strange-french-warmist-his.html

His personal history as lodged with the U.N. may be of interest

2. Date of birth: 12 07 1953

3. Place of birth: Jemappes, Belgium

4. Nationality(ies) at birth: Belgium

5. Present nationality(ies) Belgium, South Africa

9. Marital status: Single

11. Permanent address: 96, avenue des Combattants, B-1332 Genval, Belgium

13. Office Telephone No. +3226541555

15, Have you any dependents? NO

So he appears to be an old guy (67) who has never married. Being as angry-natured as he is, one can understand that no woman wanted him as a husband. So he has diverted the passions and energies that might have gone into raising a family into defending the absurd theory of catastrophic global warming. So it is no wonder that he gets angry at anyone who pokes holes into his central life belief

He certainly has ego problems. His assertion that "French is the language of every educated gentleman" is a hoot. Anglo-Saxons rarely use French so are none of them gentlemen? It is a really desperate claim to virtue which he himself undermines: After a very simple sentence in French he immediately lapses back into bad English, thus illustrating the supremacy of English



Slight, beneficial warming from more carbon dioxide!

Exhaustive study finds more CO2 and water molecules will not cause dangerous warming

David Wojick, Ph.D.

Precision research by physicists William Happer and Willem van Wijngaarden has determined that the current levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and water vapor are “saturated.” In radiation physics that means adding more CO2 or water molecules will bring modest warming that will benefit plant growth, and thus all life on Earth. More CO2 and H2O will not cause dangerous warming.

From this point forward, emissions from burning fossil fuels will bring little additional global warming, and what does occur will improve forests, grasslands and agriculture. There is no climate emergency.

This finding is astounding, paradigm shattering, contrary to what alarmist scientists have told us for decades. Scientifically, it resolves a huge uncertainty that has plagued climate science for over a century: How should saturation be measured, and what is its extent regarding the primary greenhouse gases?

Just as “the greenhouse effect” is nothing akin to how greenhouses work, in radiation physics “saturation” is nothing like the simple, everyday concept of saturation. Your paper towel is saturated when it won't pick up any more spilled milk. Greenhouse gases are saturated when adding more water, methane or carbon dioxide molecules has no significant further effects on planetary warming and climate.

Dr. Happer is known as a leading skeptic of “dangerous human-caused climate change.” He co-founded the prestigious CO2 Coalition and served on the National Security Council, advising President Trump. But his career has been as a world-class radiation physicist at Princeton. Dr. van Wijngaarden teaches and conducts research in pure and applied physics at York University in Canada. Happer’s numerous peer-reviewed journal articles have collectively garnered over 12,000 citations by other researchers.

In their study, Professors Happer and van Wijngaarden (H&W) analyzed saturation physics in painstaking detail. Their preprint, “Dependence of Earth’s Thermal Radiation on Five Most Abundant Greenhouse Gases,” goes far beyond any work done previously on this complex problem.

To begin with, standard studies examine the absorption of solar radiation by greenhouse molecules using crude absorption bands of radiation energy. H&W go far beyond this, to analyze the millions of distinct energies, called spectral lines, that make up these bands. Their detailed line-by-line approach is an emerging field that often yields dramatically new results – and here contradict prevailing climate theory.

Moreover, H&W do not look only at absorption. As Dr. Happer explained it to me: First, thermal emission of greenhouse gases is just as important as absorption. Second, how the atmosphere’s temperature varies with altitude is just as important as its concentration of greenhouse gases.

The two physicists therefore looked hard, not just at absorption, but also at emissions and atmospheric temperature variation. The work is far more complex than I, most non-physicist scientists, and certainly most citizens and politicians can understand. However, the conclusions are simple and dramatically clear.

Happer and van Wijngaarden’s central conclusion is this: For the most abundant greenhouse gases, H2O and CO2, the saturation effects are extreme, with per-molecule forcing powers suppressed by four orders of magnitude at standard concentrations. (Forcing power means effects on atmospheric temperature.)

Their graphs are especially compelling: Figure 9 and Tables 2 and 4 show that, at current concentrations, the forcings from all greenhouse gases are saturated. The saturations of the most abundant greenhouse gases, H2O and CO2, mean the per-molecule forcing is weakened by a factor of 10,000.

The other greenhouse gases analyzed are ozone, nitrous oxide and methane. These are also nearly saturated, but not as completely as water vapor and carbon dioxide. They are also even less significant components of the atmosphere than CO2 (0.0415% or 415 ppm), which in turn is tiny compared to H2O (3% or less). At just 0.00019% methane truly has minuscule influence on climate.

The climate science community clearly needs to consider this work very carefully. This may not be easy since three major physics journals have refused to publish it. Their reviews have been defensive and antagonistic, instead of thoughtful, science-based or helpful. Climate alarmism seems to control these journals, and they tend to censor contrary findings. That’s why H&W released the preprint version.

Undaunted, H&W are now extending their analysis to include clouds. Alarmist climate science bases its “dangerous manmade” global warming, not on the CO2 increase alone, but also on incorporating positive water vapor and cloud feedbacks: emphasizing heat-trapping properties of clouds, while largely ignoring the degree to which clouds also block or reflect incoming solar radiation. Because carbon dioxide and water vapor are both saturated, it is highly unlikely that any positive cloud feedbacks can do much damage. However further careful analysis is needed to know this for sure. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, America and the world are forced to ponder only “permissible” climate science – which is being used to justify demands that we eliminate the fossil fuels that provide 80% of all US and world energy, and replace that energy with enormous numbers of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, new transmission lines ... and mines to produce their raw materials ... all with major environmental impacts.

“Permissible” climate science is also being used as the basis for computer models that purport to predict planetary warming and weather 50 to 100 years from now. The models have not gotten anything correct up to now, which is understandable since the physics on which they are based is so faulty.

The good news, says Science and Environmental Policy Project president Ken Haapala, is that humanity’s use of fossil fuels and addition of CO2 to the atmosphere are not causing a climate crisis. Cutting existing atmospheric CO2 levels in half would have little effect on climate – but would harm plant growth and the ability of forests, food crops and grasslands to survive droughts and other stress. “Carbon capture” (actually carbon dioxide capture) is of little value, and would just increase electricity prices.

As to climate “tipping points” – at which the Earth gets inexorably hotter, never to cool down – the very notion is laughable. Over the ages, our planet has swung back and forth from moderate to very warm periods; from ice ages and mile-high glaciers across half of North America and Europe to interglacial periods, like the one we are in now; from the Medieval warm period to the Little Ice Age, 1350-1810, Haapala notes. (The LIA was ending just about the time the fossil fuel and industrial era began.)

Put another way, because greenhouse gases are already saturated, there is no reason we should accept IPCC or other claims that planetary temperatures could rise more than 3.0 ͦ C (5.4ᵒ F) without compelling empirical evidence of strong atmospheric warming. That evidence is totally lacking in IPCC reports, and satellite measurements find no strong warming. Accepting alarmist claims is science denial.

In reality, according to atmospheric temperature trends measured by satellites and weather balloons, and tracked by the Earth System Science Center, University of Alabama-Huntsville, the warming trend is modest. Since January 1979, it has remained at +0.14ᵒC/decade (+0.12ᵒC/decade over the global-averaged oceans, and +0.18ᵒC/decade over global-averaged land areas). That’s just 0.25ᵒF per decade, or 2.5ᵒF per century – modest, beneficial warming; certainly nothing remotely catastrophic.

Some of that warming is likely to be manmade. But most of it is natural and not at all unprecedented.

Moreover, the atmospheric “hot spot” above the tropics predicted by climate models is nowhere to be found. Put another way, for carbon dioxide to have significant impacts on global temperatures, humanity would have to burn more fossil fuels than are known to exist on our planet, Haapala concludes.

It’s no wonder climate alarmists, computer modelers, Green New Deal proponents, and wind turbine, solar panel, battery and concrete salesmen want to silence Happer and van Wijngaarden – or at least keep their work out of scientific journals. It’s also not surprising that China is happy to see the H&W science suppressed: its companies will be the ones selling us turbines, panels and batteries. Follow the science!

Via email

Pebble Mine project in Alaska dealt blow as Army Corps of Engineers determines it’s against public interest

It's not the role of the courts to determine what is in the public interest. That is the role of governments

The Trump administration on Wednesday effectively killed a contentious proposed mine in Alaska, a gold and copper prospect envisioned to be nearly as deep as the Grand Canyon and could fill an NFL stadium nearly 3,900 times with waste — all near the headwaters of the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery.

The Army Corps of Engineers “concluded that the proposed project is contrary to the public interest” and denied a permit to build the Pebble Mine under both the Clean Water Act and the Rivers and Harbors Act, the agency said in a statement.

The rejection was a surprise. It’s at odds with President Donald Trump’s efforts to encourage energy development in Alaska, including opening up part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, and other moves nationwide to roll back environmental protections that would benefit oil and gas and other industries.

The Corps of Engineers also seemed to signal just a few months ago that Pebble Mine was on a fast track to approval, a reversal from what many had expected under the Obama administration.

But unlike drilling elsewhere in Alaska, the mine proposed for the southwestern Bristol Bay region could have negatively affected the state’s billion-dollar fishing industry. Conservationists and even Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., sounded the alarm on the project before the administration changed course again.

Alaska’s two Republican U.S. senators, who support oil and gas development and mining, hailed the rejection of the Pebble Mine permit.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski said the decision affirmed her position that it’s the wrong mine in the wrong place. “It should validate our trust and faith in the well-established permitting process used to advance resource development projects throughout Alaska. It will help ensure the continued protection of an irreplaceable resource — Bristol Bay’s world-class salmon fishery,” she said.

Sen. Dan Sullivan said he would remain an advocate for good-paying jobs derived from resource development. “However, given the special nature of the Bristol Bay watershed and the fisheries and subsistence resources downstream, Pebble had to meet a high bar so that we do not trade one resource for another,” he said. “Pebble did not meet that bar.”

The CEO of the Pebble Limited Partnership, the mine’s developers, said he was dismayed by the decision, especially after the corps had indicated in an environmental impact statement in July that the mine and fishery could coexist.

“One of the real tragedies of this decision is the loss of economic opportunities for people living in the area,” CEO John Shively said in a statement. The environmental review “clearly describes those benefits, and now a politically driven decision has taken away the hope that many had for a better life. This is also a lost opportunity for the state’s future economy.”

He said they are considering their next steps, which could include an appeal of the corps’ decision.

Solar and Wind Power Struggle as California Faces Blackouts

Rolling electric power blackouts afflicted roughly 2 million California residents in August as a heat wave gripped the Golden State. At the center of the problem is a state policy requiring that 33 percent of California's electricity come from renewable sources such as solar and wind power, rising to a goal of 60 percent by 2030. Yet data showed that power demand peaks just before the sun begins to go down, when overheated people turn up their air conditioning in the late afternoon. Meanwhile, the power output from California's wind farms in August was erratic.

Until this summer, California utilities and grid operators were able to purchase extra electricity from other states. But the August heat wave stretched from Texas to Oregon, so there was little to no surplus energy available. According to the San Jose Mercury News, California electricity grid operators warned in September 2019 that power shortages might become increasingly common when heat waves hit in the coming years.

California still has some natural gas power plants that can be ramped up to supply energy when renewable supplies fail. But "some folks in the environmental community want to shut down all the gas plants," Jan Smutny-Jones, CEO of the Independent Energy Producers Association, a trade association representing solar, wind, geothermal, and gas power plants, told The Mercury News in August. "That would be a disaster. Last night 60 percent of the power in [the California Independent System Operator electricity network] was being produced by those gas plants. They are your insurance policy to get through heat waves."

Union of Concerned Scientists analyst Mark Specht, by contrast, told NPR that "the solution is definitely not more natural gas plants. Really, if anything, this is an indication that California should speed up its investments in clean energy and energy storage."

An important fact is missing from this debate: California has been bringing the hammer down on a huge source of safe, reliable, always-on, non-carbon-dioxide-emitting electricity: nuclear power. In 2013, state regulators forced the closing of the San Onofre nuclear power plant, which supplied electricity to 1.4 million households. By 2025, California regulators plan to close the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, which can supply electricity to 3 million households.

The problem of climate change, along with the blackouts resulting from the vagaries of wind and solar power, suggests that California should not only keep its nuclear power plants running but also build more innovative reactors designed to flexibly back up variable renewable electricity generation.

https://reason.com/2020/11/16/solar-and-wind-power-struggle-as-california-faces-blackouts/

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