Extraterrestrial Forcing of Surface Temperature and Climate Change: A Parody

Jamal Munshi mocks Warmist statistics, showing they prove nothing

Abstract

It is proposed that visitation by extraterrestrial spacecraft (UFO) alters the electromagnetic properties of the earth, its atmosphere, and its oceans and that these changes can cause global warming leading to climate change and thence to the catastrophic consequences of floods, droughts, severe storms, and sea level rise. An empirical test of this theory is presented with data for UFO sightings and surface temperature reconstructions for the study period 1910-2015. The results show strong evidence of proportionality between surface temperature and cumulative UFO sightings. We conclude that the observed warming since the Industrial Revolution are due to an electromagnetic perturbation of the climate system by UFO extraterrestrial spacecraft.

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Study: Battery Storage Far Too Costly For Practical Use

Exorbitant battery storage costs prevent rooftop solar installations from paying for themselves in the long run, making home energy storage an impractical use for average consumers in the foreseeable future, a new study determined.

As the renewable energy industry continues to draw more interest from environmentally conscious consumers, battery storage technology is becoming more sought after as a means to harness energy for future consumption. For example, solar panel batteries can store excess energy captured during the daytime and use that energy to keep the lights on after the sun goes down. Consumers are encouraged to purchase solar panels with promises that, in the long run, they will save money on monthly electrical bills.

However, a study released Monday by the Global Warming Policy Foundation revealed that battery storage is simply too costly to provide long-term financial benefit.

“The price of batteries is relatively high, but the possible savings from adding them to a rooftop solar installation are quite limited, particularly as a fraction of the typical electricity bill. When you add up the costs and benefits, it is quite clear that they are a waste of money,” Capell Aris, a former reactor physics specialist and a fellow at the Institute of Engineering and Technology, wrote Monday.

The study Aris conducted took into consideration typical solar panel installations and basic electricity consumption over the course of one day and a year in the United Kingdom. The variables he considered were comprehensive, factoring in weather patterns and the degradation of solar panel efficiency over time. The factors were repeated to cover a 20-year period.

The results: Solar rooftop installations are a far cry away from keeping pace with household energy consumption in the U.K. Their use would result in long-term savings for users if costs were to drop dramatically, but that does not appear to be happening anytime soon.

“There is no doubt that battery prices are falling, but even if we make some fairly optimistic assumptions about performance, prices would have to fall by another 50 percent just to break even. They would need to come down even further than that to give a financial return,” Aris said. “It’s hard to see this happening any time soon. Battery storage for rooftop solar is simply not an economic prospect, and will likely remain that way.”

The study follows mounting questions about the true cost of solar panel installation in the United States. Widespread residential and commercial use of solar panel technology would not be feasible without a flood of subsidies from the government.

Upon a study of their net metering program, Montana revealed earlier this month that their largest utility company was over compensating net metering customers three times the market value for their energy. An investigative report Friday by America Rising Squared detailed the billions of dollars the federal government shelled out in 2016 alone to prop up otherwise unprofitable renewable energy programs.

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Starving for Accurate Information on Polar Bears

A viral video of a starving polar bear blamed climate change, but that's yet another lie

At this time of year, we’re accustomed to seeing polar bears as a holiday mascot for a certain soft drink. But you can rest assured that thousands of real live polar bears are anything but cute and cuddly as they hunt down and devour Arctic seals and assorted other prey.

Sadly, there’s one unnamed polar bear that most likely didn’t live to enjoy this time of plenty. In late August, the photography team of Paul Nicklen and Christina Mittermeier happened upon an emaciated member of the species that was down to its last brief bursts of energy, desperately rummaging through garbage heaps in a vain search for nourishment. “This is what a starving polar bear looks like,” wrote Mittermeier. “Weak muscles, atrophied by extended starvation could barely hold him up.”

Laying it on even thicker, Nicklen added, “We stood there crying — filming with tears rolling down our cheeks.” They added that there was nothing they could do to help, because feeding wild animals is illegal and “it’s not like we travel around with 200-300 pounds of seal meat.” And while they conceded that they couldn’t completely pin down the cause of the bear’s imminent demise, they presumed global warming was the culprit. “This is the face of climate change,” Mittermeier asserted. Paul Amstrup of Polar Bears International added, “Despite uncertainties about how this bear got into this starving condition, we can be absolutely certain if we allow the world to continue to warm, there will be ever greater numbers of such events as survival rates decline over more and more of the polar bear range.”

But not so fast, say the skeptics. First off, they counter, it’s not unusual to see starving polar bears in late August as that’s near the end of their dormant period. “That bear is starving, but it’s not starving because the ice suddenly disappeared and it could no longer hunt seals,” wrote Arctic wildlife biologist Jeff Higdon. Population-wise, polar bears are certainly not in immediate danger of extinction. In fact, some regions of the polar north have a significant polar bear presence.

Research — based on years’ worth of observations — tells us that, if anything, Arctic sea ice arrived on time, or even a bit early this winter — so healthy bears were easily able to swim out to their hunting grounds and floes of ice. Polar bear scientist Susan Crockford made the case that things were just fine. For her trouble, Crockford had her reputation sullied in the worst way. Terence Corcoran recounts:

As a starting point, we look to a story published December 1st on Vice News’s tech site. Motherboard, that included an interview with U.S. polar bear scientist/activist Stephen Amstrup. In the article, Amstrup accuses Canadian polar bear scientist Susan Crockford of filling her bear research with extreme allegations. Climate activists have targeted Crockford, a zoologist and adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Victoria, because her research inconveniently finds that, despite their claims, polar bears are not at risk. ‘You don’t have to read far in her material to see that it is full of unsubstantiated statements and personal attacks on scientists, using names like eco-terrorists, fraudsters, green terrorists and scammers,’ Amstrup claimed.

A few days later, Motherboard published a slithery retraction. After Crockford complained that Amstrup’s comments about her were “a lie” and that she has never used such terms, Amstrup “clarified” his comments. He said that when he accused Crockford of calling scientists fraudsters, he really meant to accuse “climate deniers as a whole, rather than Crockford in particular.”

Life is often made more difficult for those who don’t worship at the altar of climate change, and Crockford’s sin is that of being an oft-cited skeptic to the “polar bears are going extinct” narrative. Polar bears do indeed make for cute and cuddly symbols of the far north, and for now they aren’t going anywhere fast — despite what some with an agenda would lead us to believe.

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Short-term versus long-term changes in the temperature record of North Rhine-Westphalia

In pre-industrial times, significant climatic fluctuations occurred in North Rhine-Westphalia and elsewhere, some of which even exceeded the modern temperature level. Common climate models can not reproduce the preindustrial climate history -- Translated from the German of Sebastian Lüning

In the course of global industrialization and the use of fossil fuels, the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration has risen to its highest level in 800,000 years. At the same time, the temperature of the earth has increased by almost one degree in the last 150 years. However, the exact quantitative proportion of man-made and natural climatic factors in this warming is still unclear and is due to the inaccurately known climate impact of CO 2 , the so-called CO 2Coupled with climate sensitivity.

In order to better understand the natural contribution to current climate change, a preoccupation with the preindustrial climate history is necessary. Only when the natural climate dynamics of the last millennia have been correctly recorded and the corresponding drives understood, can today's overall climate system consisting of natural and anthropogenic drives be fully understood and quantified.

Great importance is given to earlier natural heat episodes that occurred locally to globally every 1000-2000 years and whose exact causes are still under investigation. Unfortunately, many accounts of climate change lack such a climate-historical vision. Thus, the consideration in the climate status reports on North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) begins only in 1880 (LANUV, 2010, 2016). The publisher of the reports, the State Office for Nature, Environment and Consumer Protection of North Rhine-Westphalia (LANUV), blatantly fails to classify the current climatic changes in a longer-term context. The year 1880 corresponds to the end of the so-called Little Ice Age (15th-19th century), one of the coldest episodes in the history of climate in the past 10,000 years.

Thus, the LANUV refers all considerations to a special climatic phase. This is unusual, since it differs from the usual scientific practice to compare the events with long-term average values, the so-called baseline (Lüning and Vahrenholt, 2017). For example, the average temperature of the past 2000 or 10,000 years would have been more suitable, with several natural cold / warm phases included. Only the classification into the longer-term climatic context makes it possible to decide to what extent the current climatic changes have already left the range of the natural fluctuation range.

In the following, therefore, the temperature development of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and neighboring regions will be explained by way of example. In addition, the current state of discussion on the validation of climate models and CO 2 climate sensitivity is summarized.


The record:

Last 100 years

The mean annual mean temperature in North Rhine-Westphalia has increased by about one and a half degrees over the last 135 years based on data from the German Weather Service (DWD) (Figure 1).


Fig. 1: Development of the average annual temperature in North Rhine-Westphalia during the past 135 years. Source: DWD


Last 1000 years

The Modern Heat Phase is not the only warming period in post-glacial climate history. Already in the Middle Ages 1000 years ago, a warm phase occurred, which is particularly well-known from the North Atlantic region, but was also pronounced in many regions of the rest of the world, eg in Africa (Lüning et al., 2017). Thus, the Medieval Warming Period (MWP) and Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) were also described from the NRW neighboring state of Rhineland-Palatinate (RP). Moschen et al. (2011) reconstructed the temperature history based on carbon isotopes in a peat core from the Dürren Maar. They found a warming of more than 5 ° C in the transition of the cold period of the Migration Period (500-700 AD) to MWP ( Figure 2). In this context, there appeared to be strong warming bursts, with temperatures naturally skyrocketing by several degrees within a few decades. In this respect neither the current temperature level nor the current rate of warming in the NRW-RP area seems to be unprecedented in the historical context.


Fig. 2: Temperature evolution of the Dürren Maar (Eifel) during the last 2000 years based on a temperature reconstruction based on cellulose carbon isotopes of a peat core. Zero point of the temperature anomaly scale is slightly above the temperature average of the last 2,000 years (Little Ice Age is missing). Left curve: Unsmoothed data. Right curve: moving average over 60 years. Data digitized by Moschen et al. (2011)


Last 10,000 years

Extending the reference period to the last 10,000 years, it becomes clear that there were a whole series of warm and cold phases in pre-industrial times. In science, it is referred to as climatic millennium cycles, since the changes occurred at intervals of 1000-2000 years. The cycles have been described from all parts of the world (Lüning and Vahrenholt, 2016) and could derive at least part of their drive from fluctuating solar activity (Bond et al., 2001). Other researchers assume an internal climate pulse.

Such a millennium cycle was also described in the Sauerland Bunker Cave by Fohlmeister et al. (2012). Rhythmic changes in the oxygen isotope stalactites have shown continuous natural climate change over the past 11,000 years, with the system varying between warm / humid and cold / dry (Figure 3). The change between the cold phase of the migration period, MWP and modern heat period is clearly visible in the cave reconstruction.


Fig. 3: Natural climatic fluctuations in the Sauerland over the past 11,000 years, reconstructed on the basis of oxygen isotope fluctuations ( δ 18 O) from dripstones of the bunker. Unit in per thousand of oxygen isotopes. CWP = Modern Warm Period, MWP = Medieval Warm Period, DACP = Cold Ages Cold Period, RWP = Roman Warm Period. Age scale shows years before 1950 (Years BP, before, present '= 1950). Data from Fohlmeister et al. (2012) , downloaded from https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/study/20589

A particularly warm phase was the so-called Holocene Thermal Maximum (HTM), which occurred in the period 8000-5500 years before today. Kühl and Moschen (2012) reconstructed the temperature of this climate episode for the drought Maar using pollen. It was found that the temperatures in the Eifel at that time were more than a degree above the current level of heat (1990-2017, Fig. 1), or almost two degrees, if one takes the cooler reference interval 1961-1990 as a benchmark. The July temperatures of the Eifel during the HTM were 18.0-18.5 ° C, whereas at the nearest weather station Manderscheid in the DWD reference interval 1961-1990 a July average of 16.3 ° C was measured (Kühl and Moschen , 2012).

The field of paleoclimatology has made great advances in the last 15 years, and a multitude of new local temperature reconstructions have been made throughout the world. However, the regional and supraregional synthesis of these data lags somewhat behind. So far there is still no robust global temperature reconstruction for the past 10,000 years, in which both land and sea temperatures are integrated. The much-cited curve of Marcott et al. (2013) relies almost exclusively on sea temperatures, but the temperature change is much less severe than on land due to the thermal inertia of the oceans. A global temperature reconstruction for the past 2,000 years by the PAGES 2k Consortium (2013) found that in the period 1-600 AD. Apparently already several times at least as warm as today.

However, changes are still to be expected here, as the reconstruction relies heavily on tree ring data, which in many cases comes from unpublished and unexamined sources. In addition, other inappropriate data appear to have been included in the averages (eg, Africa: Lüning et al., 2017)

 In this respect, the focus here should first be placed on more reliable local temperature series such as the Bunker Cave and the Drought Maar, and hopefully soon improved global temperature curves will become available in the future.

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"The Guardian" is disappointed by the polls

See below

Gallup released its annual survey on American perceptions about global warming last week, and the results were a bit discouraging. While 85–90% of Democrats are worried about global warming, realize humans are causing it, and are aware that most scientists agree on this, independents and Republicans are a different story. Only 35% of Republicans and 62% of independents realize humans are causing global warming (down from 40% and 70% last year, respectively), a similar number are worried about it, and only 42% of Republicans and 65% of independents are aware of the scientific consensus – also significantly down from last year’s Gallup poll.

The Trump administration’s polarizing stance on climate change is probably the main contributor to this decline in conservative acceptance of climate change realities. A recent study found evidence that “Americans may have formed their attitudes [on climate change] by using party elite cues” delivered via the media. In particular, the study found that Fox News “is consistently more partisan than other [news] outlets” and has incorporated politicians into the majority of its climate segments.

Nevertheless, public awareness about climate change realities has improved over the long-term. For example, about two-thirds of Americans now realize that most scientists agree global warming is occurring, up from less than half in 1997.

There’s also a strong correlation between awareness of the expert consensus, that humans are causing global warming, and concern about the issue. This suggests that when people are aware that experts agree, they accept the consensus and realize we need to address the problem. This is consistent with research finding that the expert consensus is a ‘gateway belief’ leading to public support for climate action.

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