Climate Change has a new logo

After 4.5 billion years, finally climate change has a new logo.  But even some fans of the the Big Scare Campaign don’t like it. I can’t think why…


(It is dying – the fear of a carbon crisis.)

It looks to me like an inverse-SEO campaign designed by someone deeply afflicted with ASE (Artistic Status Envy — see also its Literary equivalent). Is the aim here just the banal trickery of ambushing the new skeptics who type “It’s not warming” into their search engines? Will gullible teens type in the phrase and find nothing but links to soft-green propaganda? (This could so easily backfire).

Or is this a new form of mental programming for the inductees into the climate faith? Now, when they hear “it’s not warming”, they’ll be getting confirmation — warming means “bad stuff”, now not warming means “bad stuff too!” It’s a form of deep psychology — so deep it’s done right through the magma and come out the other side.

If it looks upside down, that’s because it is.  Jeremy Porter on Grist is not impressed:

“It’s not warming, it’s dying.” That’s the message from the man behind the “I ♥ NY” logo, Milton Glaser. The message comes with a logo and buttons that people can buy and wear. Glaser says that “global warming” is not good language. On that, he’s right, but reframing it as “global dying” is worse."

In an interview with WNYC’s Brian Lehrer, Glaser said, “Global warming in its own way sounds sort of reassuring and comforting … that’s terrible. You begin by attacking the phrase itself — the word and what the word means — because the truth of the matter is that the earth is dying. And wouldn’t it be nice if today was the beginning of the most important date in human history which is the date we decided not to let the earth die?”

Arguing that the earth is dying is serious error and will probably do more harm than good. Two reasons why:

“Global dying” keeps the issue firmly in the abstract.
The earth isn’t dying. People are.

No self respecting climate-goth would be without one.

Porter finds something nice to say: “At least the buttons don’t have any words on them.”

That really sums up their arguments perfectly.

Me I think this is a case of over-reach. It’s a clumsy attempt at a segue from the not-so-scary “climate change” and the failed “global warming” to see if they can get to “global dying”. And there they go following a hero again. Glaser is a “legend” who designed something “iconic”. What could possibly go wrong?

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The world is actually getting greener







The Political Play Behind the Keystone Delay

The Keystone XL Pipeline is a $5.3 billion project meant to carry Canadian oil sands to refineries on the Gulf Coast. The southern leg, from Nebraska to the Texas coast, is already built; the remaining section awaiting approval from the Obama administration would stretch from Steele City, Nebraska, to Hardisty, Alberta. The primary goal is energy provision and production, but other benefits include jobs and cleaner, safer transport for oil. Yet environmentalists have made it their mission to thwart the pipeline, and the Obama administration has stalled for years on approving it.

The latest wrench in the works is a new study published in Nature Climate Change claiming that building the pipeline would create at least four times the State Department’s estimate of greenhouse gases. According to the Los Angeles Times, “In its environmental impact statement issued in February, the State Department estimated that the Keystone XL pipeline, which would ultimately carry 830,000 barrels of oil daily, could increase emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases by 1.3 million to 27.4 million metric tons annually.” The new Nature Climate Change study, on the other hand, estimates annual emissions could exceed 100 million metric tons.

To reach their conclusion, study authors Peter Erickson and Michael Lazarus, both scientists at Seattle’s Stockholm Environment Institute, calculate the pipeline would mean cheaper oil and gas, leading to higher consumption and, therefore, more greenhouse gases. They write, “We find that for every barrel of increased production, global oil consumption would increase 0.6 barrels owing to the incremental decrease in global oil prices.” The State Department’s own study, on the other hand, estimated that oil consumption would not increase because alternative means already exist for transporting the oil to refineries.

In June 2013, Barack Obama said Keystone would win his approval only if “it does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.” In February, the State Department found just that, though in a Good Friday news dump in April, the administration said it was delaying its decision again. Perhaps Obama’s comments in June last year were a signal to his environmental allies to come up with their own alarm bells, and the Easter delay was a bid to give them more time.

In related oil news, the administration recently teased the idea of oil and natural gas exploration in the Atlantic Ocean, perhaps even moving toward opening the Atlantic to drilling. The Hill reports, “In June, the administration gave its strongest signal to date that the Atlantic would likely be included in the Interior Department’s five-year lease plan for 2017-2022, by opening it up to new oil and gas exploration for the first time in 30 years.” That would be a huge policy shift.

Naturally, ecofascist groups jumped to action. The Hill notes, “Environmentalists, and lawmakers who oppose opening new areas to development are already pushing back, flooding the Interior Department will comments arguing against new drilling.” On the other side, the governors of Virginia and both Carolinas support Atlantic drilling for the economic benefits to their states.

Obama likes to have it both ways with energy by obstructing fossil fuel exploration, drilling and production at every turn while boasting of the increased oil production during his tenure. As we have noted on numerous occasions, however, the current oil boom is thanks entirely to increased production on private and state lands. Federal lands (and waters) have remained almost entirely off limits. And even if Obama did approve drilling in the Atlantic, it wouldn’t begin until after he leaves office.

In the case of the Atlantic, Obama’s play may be the same as with Keystone – signal that he’s about to approve something so as to motivate his ecofascist constituents to plead their case, allowing him to hear their concerns and respond by stalling, all right before November’s election. For this president, everything is politics, so whatever his angle, it’s not with an eye on the nation’s best interests regarding critical energy needs.

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OCEAN ACIDIFICATION CLAIMS ARE MISLEADING – AND DELIBERATELY SO

Chemistry debunks junk climate science in the 'global warming causes ocean acidification' debate. Established Chemistry proves that if temperatures were rising then, conversely, acidification would be falling, not increasing. Such is the woeful science ignorance (or intentional deceit) of climate alarmists.

ACID TEST

Indisputable facts

carbon dioxide (CO2), dissolved in pure water, makes a weak, unstable acid, whilst the ocean water is a very stable buffer with a pH averaging around 8, which means it is alkaline;

there isn’t enough CO2 in the atmosphere to make much difference to the ocean’s pH;

the concentration of enough CO2 to significantly reduce the ocean’s pH will not come from the atmosphere;

the mass of the oceans is a huge 268 times the mass of the atmosphere;

CO2 is currently only 0.04% of that atmosphere.

Discussion about those facts

Besides the above chemical and physical facts, it is well known that an increase in water temperature will reduce the solubility of CO2.

Leave any opened cold carbonated drink – from champagne to Coke - to warm up and see what happens to the fizz, which is CO2 in case you didn’t know. Your warmed champagne/Coke goes 'flat' because the carbon dioxide has escaped the liquid and entered the atmosphere.

It is therefore not rocket science to state with complete confidence that warm water naturally contains less CO2 than cold water.

The oceans are outgassing CO2 due to the slight warming trend since the end of the Mini Ice Age (c. 1850's). The exact cause of this trend IS NOT known and remains the subject of much scientific debate! There is evidence that there is a gap of many centuries between planet-wide temperature swings and atmospheric CO2 concentrations.

The Climate Alarmist’s Case

Climate alarmists are stunningly contradictory and actually amusing if they didn’t hold the world at ransom over this non-problem of a slight increase in CO2 concentrations.

They point out the slight increasing trend in temperatures as alarming!

They point out the side effect of this slight increasing trend in temperatures – rising sea levels – as alarming!

Then they claim man’s CO2 emissions will increase ocean acidification – as alarming!

But you simply cannot have it both ways – that is an “Inconvenient Truth”!

Summary and Conclusion

Either the oceans are getting warmer and the CO2 concentration in seawater is decreasing, which means that ocean acidification from man-made CO2 from the atmosphere is nonsense.

Or the oceans are getting cooler and the man-made CO2 from the atmosphere is dissolving in those cooler oceans and causing – insignificant – ocean acidification, which means that warming oceans and the associated sea level rises are nonsense.

Take your pick – REAL SCIENCE says you can’t have both.

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TIME TO REASSESS THE ROLE OF THE SUN IN CLIMATE CHANGE

As the so called pause in global warming continues, space scientists may be giving climate scientists some pause for thought. sunnspot number

Global surface temperatures have remained statistically flat for over a decade following a rapid rise in the second half of the 20th century despite the fact that the long-term increase in carbon dioxide associated with this rapid global warming has continued throughout the whole of the pause period.

Two pieces of research published this year suggest that the sun has played a bigger role in these events than is widely accepted by climate scientists and they imply, as a result, that the role of 'greenhouse gases' may be less significant than climate scientists currently believe.

The research shows that the sun is far more variable than we had previously thought and that variations in solar activity correlate very closely with changes in global surface temperature. This challenges the prevailing orthodoxy in climate science that our star plays no significant role in global warming.

Minuscule solar impact on climate change

Most climate scientists believe that the sun is a stable star and contributes relatively little to climate change compared with the massive warming impact – or radiative forcing – of human greenhouse gas emissions. And, for a quarter of a century, this has been the settled view of the international climate science establishment led by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The most recent IPCC scientific report published last year – the AR5 WG 1 – states that the total natural contribution to global warming “from solar irradiance changes and stratospheric volcanic aerosols made only a small contribution to the net radiative forcing throughout the last century”. And the evidence they cite would appear to support this contention.

Solar heating on the Earth is measured by what is called total solar irradiance – the average amount of solar energy falling on the Earth. Total solar irradiance is measured in watts of energy per square meter (W/m2) and data in the last IPCC report shows that solar irradiance between 1755 and 2012 varied in a narrow band throughout this period by only around 0.02 per cent… Minuscule.

Indeed, the IPCC report states that the warming effect due to human greenhouse gas emissions – what it calls the effective radiative forcing – is 2.3 W/m2 compared with a radiative forcing due to the small variations in solar irradiance of around 0.05 W/m2. In other words, the impact of the sun on the climate is only around 2 per cent of the scale of the impact of human 'greenhouse gas' emissions.

Strong correlation between the sun and climate

However, research from an international team of space scientists shows that the second half of the last century – the very time when global temperatures started to tick up significantly – coincided with a once in 3,000 year record high in solar activity (see the graph at the top of the page). The paper, published in a specialist space science journal called Astronomy & Astrophysics, makes only passing and understated reference to the implications of the research on climate science reporting that: “These results provide important constraints for both dynamo models of Sun-like stars and investigations of possible solar influence on Earth’s climate”.

But another group of space science researchers from China took a much more combative stance earlier this year when they published a paper in the Chinese Science Bulletin which showed a strong correlation between the variation in the temperature of the surface of the Earth and variations in solar activity. Their paper explicitly stated solar activity has a “non-negligible” effect on the temperature change of the Earth”. Furthermore, they issued a press release to coincide with the appearance of their paper stating: “The climate models of IPCC seem to underestimate the impact of natural factors on the climate change, while overstate that of human activities. Solar activity is an important ingredient of natural driving forces of climate”. In the rarefied atmosphere of scientific debate, this constitutes fighting talk.

A mechanism connecting sun spot activity with the atmosphere

If there is a link between solar activity and the climate then it would need to be more subtle than the simple heating impact of solar radiation which appears to vary little. One possibility, suggested by NASA, is that solar magnetism associated with sun spots plays a role. In 2010 research published in Nature reported that NASA’s Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE) satellite had measured significant falls in ultraviolet emissions linked to reduced sun spot activity.

As NASA notes on a specialist web page dedicated to solar activity: “Although sunspots themselves produce only minor effects on solar emissions, the magnetic activity that accompanies the sunspots can produce dramatic changes in the ultraviolet and soft x-ray emission levels. These changes over the solar cycle have important consequences for the Earth’s upper atmosphere.”

Sun spots have been implicated with climate change in the past. The lack of sun spots between 1645 and 1715, known as the Maunder Minimum, has been blamed for the so called Little Ice Age. Worryingly, sun spot numbers appear to be in a long term decline at the moment with a number of solar scientists speculating that if this continues then, far from global warming, we may be in for a repeat of the Little Ice Age.

Furthermore, the sun is currently going through a particularly quiet cycle phase – the quietest in over a century – and this has led some climate change sceptics to argue that the sun is in fact the cause of the global warming pause. Now, sceptics would say that, wouldn’t they, and climate scientists stress that changes in solar output are just too small to affect the climate.

However, the space physics research on solar activity is not the work of climate sceptics and it is showing a strong correlation between solar activity and global temperature.

It is important to state that correlation does not imply causation and none of this solar research alters the fact that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases undoubtedly have a warming effect on the atmosphere.

But the circumstantial evidence that the sun plays a bigger role in climate change than hitherto thought is growing and a potential mechanism connecting sun spot related magnetic activity with upper atmospheric changes has been hypothesised.

It is now high time for climate scientists to set the established orthodoxy to one side and to reassess the contribution of the sun to climate change.

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NEW PAPER EXPOSES LONG-STANDING DATA FUDGE BY CLIMATE SCIENTISTS

New independent climate analysis reveals what may be the greatest flaw in modern climate science- a simplistic over-reliance on the assumption of steady state atmospheric conditions. New research from France employs a two-way formulation for heat evacuation by radiation from the planet rather than the standard one-dimensional 'greenhouse gas theory.'

It reveals that convection plays a more dominant role than radiation in our climate and that number fudging by so-called climate “experts” may be the only truly discernible extent of “man-made” global warming.

In a new paper, 'Diurnal Variations of Heat Evacuation from a Rotating Planet,' submitted to open peer review at Principia Scientific International (PSI), Joseph Reynen, a retired Dutch scientist living in France, puts standard climate science calculations under the microscope and reveals that for too long the “experts” used an outdated guesstimating process relied on before the modern era of accurate computing.

Reynen's study is yet further validation to what an increasing number of independent scientists are saying is a major error by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC gave an uncritical free pass to an assumed physical interpretation from a pre-computer era approximation which put a great emphasis on a fixed artificial energy absorption rate instead of actual absorption for the real energy flux coming from our sun.

As Reynen delves into the technicalities he explains, “In the beginning of the 1900's computers were not available and by splitting-up the radiation in up-ward and down-ward components, and introducing a co-ordinate transformation with the so-called optical thickness concept, analytical solutions were possible, although in the form of integrals. Quadrature techniques were available at that time to evaluate numerically those integrals, with no need for computers.”

But that assumption of fixed solar energy flux has been blown apart by the latest physical measurements by satellite and by rigorous ground-based analysis from experts from the “hard” sciences. Indeed, the scope of Reynen's paper is not to give detailed results for diurnal variations of the sun power, but rather to demonstrate that one-dimensional steady state models based on the one-way heat flow concept of Swedish professor, Claes Johnson is an accurate tool to show the very small influence of infrared-sensitive gases for the global and annual mean heat budget of the planet.

The innovative open peer review process being pioneered by PSI encourages anyone with an insight of specialist training from the “hard” sciences to cast a critical eye over papers such as this astonishing one from Reynen. “Although we are excited by Jef's findings we always let our knowledgeable readers be part of the review process” says PSI CEO, John O'Sullivan. “Unlike the biased establishment science journals we do our peer-review in public and papers such as these stand or fall by the judgment of the wider scientific community, not by a secret, hand-picked clique,” adds O'Sullivan, who highlights where readers will find some of the most fascinating details of Reynen's paper.

In figure 1, taken from [1, 2, 4 in Reynen's paper] readers can see where the implementation of the one-way heat flow finite element model has been described in detail, it has been shown that the evacuation of heat from the planet surface in steady-state is not by radiation but rather by convection.

In diurnal transients radiation has more effect.

Radiation is of course also in steady state conditions the mechanism to evacuate the heat to outer space from higher levels of the atmosphere by means of the IR-sensitive gases with 3 or more atoms per molecule.

It has been shown in [2, 4] that doubling the concentration of the IR-sensitive CO2 from 0.04% to 0.08% is causing a mere 0.1 °C increase in surface temperature, the so-called CO2 sensitivity.

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