Murry Salby: climate science innovator replicated

Swedish climate scientist Pehr Björnbom discusses below his recent replication of the work of Dr. Murry Salby, finding that temperature, not man-made CO2, drives CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.

Murry Salby is a highly qualified and well-respected professor, academic teacher, and climate scientist. He has a series of innovative talks challenging the leading circles representing the IPCC sanctioned culture of consensus in climate science. He presents startling research that fundamentally questions the established views of the IPCC consensus. An important hypothesis that he advances is that the atmospheric CO2 rate of change is a function of only the global temperature changes and that this may explain the increase in carbon dioxide from pre-industrial times. This result was I able to reproduce, in a report given here.

One of the big talking points in climate science circles is interest in Murry Salby's lecture in Hamburg recently:

It is in this lecture he presents the hypothesis that the rate of change in carbon dioxide concentration in the air follows an equation that only depends on temperature change . There is enough information in the preferred order to be able to reconstruct Murry Salby's theory in detail, as I have done in the report Reconstruction of Murry Salby's theory that carbon dioxide increase is temperature driven . My reconstruction can be summarized in the following figure where the projected path of carbon dioxide compared with the observed from Mauna Loa since 1959 and before that carbon dioxide levels from an ice core.



The correspondence between the calculated and observed values ​​is excellent if not perfect. It should be noted that Murry Salby made ​​a much more detailed analysis than me with a thorough discussion.

The Murry Salbys theory agrees well with the observed data is of course no guarantee that the theory is also consistent with reality. But this shows that the arguments given in the IPCC reports are not as solid as is often claimed. I have considered these arguments in a previous blog post Is the IPCC argument for carbon dioxide increase due to human emissions sustainable? . There are other theories that give similar results as in the figure above, such as that of Dr. Gosta Pettersson.

What my reconstruction, however, quite clearly shows is that Murry Salby's reconstruction results are reliable. Murry Salby is on firm ground when he says that his hypothesis agrees with observations of how carbon dioxide levels have increased since 1850.

Much more HERE





Malthus lives!

Have the guys below never heard of Thomas Malthus or Paul Ehrlich?  You'd think that anyone with any knowledge of the relevant history would be embarrassed to spout the bunkum below but when you live in a little Green/Left bubble, any nonsense is possible.

We actually have whole CONTINENTS where food productivity is way below what is possible -- Australia and Africa for a start.  And note that China's embrace of the market has turned that crowded country into a net food EXPORTER.  I could go on...

Contrast the Malthusian nonsense below with the more reality-based article following it

It’s a question that keeps crop scientists up at night: How are we possibly going to feed the world over the next few decades?  After all, consider what we’re up against: The global population is expected to swell from 7 billion today to 9.6 billion by 2050. The rising middle class in China and India is eating more meat than ever. And this is all happening at a time when we’re setting aside a greater slice of farmland for biofuels and trying not to cut down any more forests (which exacerbates climate change). Doing this in a sustainable manner is tricky.

In theory, there’s a simple solution here: The world’s farmers will just need to get better at squeezing more productivity out of existing farmland. Crop yields have been steadily improving since the advent of synthetic fertilizer and modern agricultural techniques. So those yields will just need to keep improving in the years to come.

But there’s a big problem: This isn’t happening. Or at least, it’s not happening fast enough. A recent peer-reviewed study in the journal PLOS ONE found that crop yields haven’t been rising at a sufficient pace to meet projected demand by 2050.

In the U.S. Midwest, wheat yields per acre have been rising at a decent 2 percent per year. But in parts of India or Eastern Europe, they’ve basically flat-lined. The same holds true for other crops: “China, India and Indonesia are witnessing rice yield increases of only 0.7%, 1.0%, and 0.4% improvement per year,” the paper notes.

There are two big reasons why yield gains could be stagnating, explained Jonathan Foley, an agricultural expert at the University of Minnesota, in an interview we did a few months back. “In many parts of the world, we haven’t seen enough investment in agriculture because of economics or policies or institutions,” he said. Many former Soviet states, say, could improve their yields through better fertilizer use. They just aren’t doing it.

But in some parts of the world, there’s a more worrisome prospect — farmers are doing everything they can to squeeze more productivity out of their farmland, but they’re starting to hit a biological “wall,” a limit on how much yields can keep rising.

And this is all a worry even before we start talking about global warming, which creates its own set of issues. Scientists like David Lobell have found evidence that extreme heat waves could hurt crop yields in the decades ahead, outweighing the benefits of warmer temperatures. And if climate change brings more frequent droughts — as some researchers expect — that would make a further dent. Australia’s wheat yields, for one, have stagnated in recent years thanks to an extended dry period.  [He obviouly has not heard about all our floods of the last few years]

“Feeding nine billion people in a truly sustainable way,” Foley concludes, “will be one of the greatest challenges our civilization has ever faced.”

SOURCE



Climate change 'will boost British farmers’



Climate change will be good for British farming, according to Caroline Spelman, the Environment Secretary, with exotic crops such as melons already thriving.

In a speech at the Oxford Farming Conference, she said that, although problems such as droughts would become more frequent, warmer weather would also mean a longer growing season and less frost damage, allowing the introduction of crops such as peaches, maize and sunflowers. Already 10,000 melons are expected to be harvested in Kent this year.

Mrs Spelman said farmers must “seize the opportunities” of increased production as well as preparing for more droughts and floods by building reservoirs and drains. “Climate change could mean reduced water availability. Also, soil moisture deficits, heat stress on animals, floods, droughts and the loss of some of the best agricultural land,” she said. “It could also bring longer growing seasons, reduced frost damage, and the opportunity to introduce new crops and livestock species.”

An advice service for farmers will offer tips on how to adapt to climate change such as the kind of crops they can plant and new breeds of sheep and cows that do well in a warmer climate. Farmers are also being encouraged to use water more efficiently through new irrigation methods and produce their own energy through solar power and from animal waste.

A study commissioned by the conference from the Scottish Agricultural College even suggested that the boost from a warmer climate could help Britain compete in the global market as production was reduced elsewhere.

Mrs Spelman warned that British agriculture would struggle in the future against emerging economies such as Brazil and China, but expertise in food safety, technology and adapting to climate change could be exported.

Last year was the second warmest year on record in the UK, with droughts in the South East and Anglia lasting into December. The Met Office predicts that the number of households under “water stress” will increase to almost a quarter of the population by 2100 as the average temperature rises by up to 3C in the South. Over the same period, an estimated 96 per cent of agricultural land will become more suitable for crops.

A presentation by the English Wine Producers association warned that so many vineyards were being planted because of warmer weather that there was a risk that England would lose its reputation for only high quality wine

SOURCE





Climate change science has become an expensive smokescreen

SIGNING off as "Mr FOIA", the person who leaked the emails from East Anglia University that came to be known as "Climategate" and that drew a line in the snow at the Copenhagen Climate Summit recently released to a select few the password to the files containing 220,000 emails.

He didn't expect the remaining emails to hold big surprises and observed, "Even if I have it all wrong and these scientists had a good reason to mislead us (instead of making a strong case with real data) I think disseminating the truth is still the safest bet by far."  Indeed it is.

That so many scientists have found it necessary to mislead us on anthropogenic global warming is an admission of political intent and the absence of a strong scientific case.

Since the release of the original Climategate emails, more revelations have come to light to support this contention.

The Delinquent Teenager exposed how non-government organisations such as Greenpeace and WWF, captured the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The book provides irrefutable evidence that what had once been accepted as the "gold standard" of climate science was nothing of the sort.

There was a second release of damaging Climategate emails and alarmist headlined research that had to be hastily withdrawn (without headlines) for want of rigour. There was another hockey stick that admitted groundless data and dire warnings of extreme weather events without evidence that a new normal had begun.

Despite this, the voices of alarm and authority have been unable to hide the reality that, statistically, there has been no increase in global temperatures since 1997, despite an 8.3 percent rise in atmospheric CO2. For those who want to cite warming in some records, all datasets agree there has been none since 2000. In fact since 2002 a slight cooling has been observed. Who knew? Well, not the warmist scientists.

Indeed, the ABC reported: "A study forecasts that global warming will set in with a vengeance after 2009, with at least half of the following five years expected to be hotter than 1998, which was the warmest year on record." Wrong. Even recent claims of an "angry" Australian summer were not validated by satellite data.

Roy Spencer, from the University of Alabama, compared 73 warming predictions to actual data across 34 years. Ending in 2012, he found an extraordinary discrepancy between what the models predicted and the actual observations of satellites and balloons. The predictions were all strongly biased to the upside. As he commented, "I frankly don't see how the IPCC can keep claiming that the models 'are not inconsistent with the observations'. Any sane person can see otherwise."

Scientists have long searched for a "hot spot" in the atmosphere. When it could not be found, some said it must be in the oceans. Yet, since the deployment in 2003 of 3000 Argo floats (the acme of ocean temperature measurement), researchers still haven't found it.

While CO2 may be a greenhouse gas, it seems that natural forces dominate climate change, not mankind's emissions. Henrik Svensmark's theory of cosmoclimatology (the role of cosmic rays) may be right.

With such mounting evidence it is hard to remain agnostic. Yet, rather than undertake a thorough rethink of US climate change policy, President Barack Obama prefers to champion discredited research to justify more initiatives that will squander the US's newly found natural gas competitiveness. He ignores the experience of Germany, the world's emissions abatement champion.

Germans discovered wind power generates only 17 per cent of plated capacity and juggling intermittent wind and solar power through the grid causes costly supply interruptions that offset CO2 savings. To ensure reliability and having shunned further nuclear investment, Germany is now building coal and gas-fired power stations.

But even with the world's second highest household electricity prices, it will probably miss its 2020 EU targets. Worse, German business is becoming less competitive despite alleged inadmissible subsidies for energy intensive industries. German corporations pay 2.2 times more for electricity than their US counterparts.

But it's not easy to stop a trillion-dollar juggernaut with facts. Any supranational emission reduction scheme that enforces conformity, provides generous subsidies, centralises authority, reduces competition, entrenches privilege for bureaucrats and the political class, and offers taxpayer-funded trips for the faithful to exotic locations will be strongly defended while the visible hardships these policies inflict are casually dismissed.

This is the world of climate change. The science has become an expensive smokescreen behind which vested interests hide.

Sooner or later, though, the laws of economics, which are more certain than the laws of anthropogenic global warming, will prevail and determine the sustainability of these gestures. Once upon a time legislators could justify the need to enforce reductions in CO2 emissions. Today we know these policies are based on back-to-the-drawing-board science and we have firsthand knowledge of their growth-slowing, economy-distorting, job-destroying impact.

In the meantime, the UN is claiming damages for "climate injustice with a human rights dimension" inflicted by wicked Western "polluters" on poor developing countries.

It wants huge financial compensation. Legitimate or not, any such claim of injustice pales in comparison to the ongoing harm and callous indifference shown by wealthy governments towards their own people.

This, is the greatest moral challenge of our time.

SOURCE





Why the MSM Is Stupid About AGW

stupidmediaThe mainstream media’s coverage of President Obama’s recent speech about anthropogenic global warming (AGW) was worse than bad, it was tragic. You have to search far and wide to find a news article that mentioned that many scientists – most, we argue – think the science behind the man-made global warming campaign is inconclusive at best. This poor reporting was deliberate: we sent MSM reporters a collection of reactions to the President’s speech that they could easily have used to include the views of skeptical climate scientists. Other think tanks did likewise.

A friend who follows the climate debate closely asked, “Why can’t we make any progress with the MSM?” Here are my top four reasons:

(1) We ARE making some progress. The Economist, New York Times, and Nature all published serious “walk back” articles in the past few weeks.  Global warming is getting less and less news coverage as readers and editors realize this movement has passed through its “broken wave” period and is now receding.

(2) 99% of reporters who cover environment and global warming are environmentalists – it really is their religion. They aren’t going to some day just “change their mind” about global warming. Most will die or retire still being true believers.

(3) The MSM is shrinking fast, measured by ad revenue and circulation, and even faster measured by credibility and influence. The reporters left behind in the MSM are under-achievers, folks without transferrable skills. (Environmental reporters were already on the bottom rung of a short ladder, so you can imagine what a talentless lot remains.) As newspapers die, their reporting gets worse and worse. In the case of environment reporting, that means more and more shrill.

(4) Business publications, such as the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, view environment issues as a contest between two industries (fossil and renewable) with environmentalists (white hats) siding with the renewables. That’s the paradigm you see in every WSJ business story about global warming. We – meaning free-market thinkers and skeptical scientists — simply don’t exist for these reporters because we don’t fit into their paradigm.  In their world, we can ONLY be “front groups” for the fossil fuel industry. Any good reporter would research that claim and find it to be laughably false, but see #3.

SOURCE





British hospitals to run on their emergency diesels?

Which are very inefficient compared to reticulated power  -- and produce lots more CO2!

Here's an extraordinary story from Friday

"NHS hospitals are being asked to cut their power demand from the National Grid as part of a government attempt to stave off power blackouts, which the energy watchdog Ofgem warns could arrive as early as 2015.

According to one energy company, four hospitals have already signed up to a deal under which they will reduce demand at peak times by using diesel-fired generators."

So in order to save the planet from the perils of carbon dioxide, we are going to run major power users on diesel generators. Canny, Mr Davey, canny.

The sheer idiocy of the situation the environmentalists in DECC have got us in to is almost unbelievable. I see no alternative to closing the whole department.

SOURCE

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