What We Don’t Know

Posted on May 13, 2013 by

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

Back in August 2010, WUWT ran an article wherein it was claimed that variations in the sun changed the rate of radioactive decay. This, of course, flew in the face of years and years of experimental evidence, starting with the Curies, that the rate of radioactive decay is constant, unaffected by pressure or temperature or anything else.

However, this claim that the sun could change radioactive decay rates was shortly challenged by a follow-up article at WUWT and then a second follow-up, both of which threw cold water on the idea.

dark energy matterFigure 1. Mass of the universe, by type. SOURCE

So I was interested to stumble across an announcement issued by Purdue University in August 2012, which strongly confirmed the reality of the phenomenon. Purdue has applied for a patent for the use of this effect as a means to supply advance warning of solar flares.

I found this most interesting, however, not because it affords a chance to have warning of another Carrington Event, although that would be great in itself. Instead, I found it interesting for a curious reason involving the mechanism whereby the sun is able to affect the rate of radioactive decay.

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Posted in Radiation, Science | Tagged , , , | 198 Comments

Corn up 7% worldwide, Paul Ehrlich of course sees agricultural collapse

Posted on May 13, 2013 by

While the alarmists wail over 400PPM of CO2, and push doom and gloom crop failure scenarios, in the real world where people risk money and livelihood, the news is far, far, better.

Bloomberg_corn

Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-25/world-grain-harvest-seen-jumping-7-by-igc-on-corn-crop-surge.html

Of course Paul Ehrlich thinks the world will end (again).  Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture | Tagged , , , | 81 Comments

Solar panels as inexpensive as paint?

Posted on May 13, 2013 by

Organic Photovoltaics: PlasmonicEnhanced Organic Photovoltaics:This would be nice, except this idea keeps surfacing every couple of years, and I’ve yet to see one actually become viable. – Anthony

“Organic photovoltaics can be fabricated over large areas on rigid or flexible substrates potentially becoming as inexpensive as paint.”

From the University of Buffalo -

Most Americans want the U.S. to place more emphasis on developing solar power, recent polls suggest.

A major impediment, however, is the cost to manufacture, install and maintain solar panels. Simply put, most people and businesses cannot afford to place them on their rooftops.

Fortunately, that is changing because researchers such as Qiaoqiang Gan, University at Buffalo assistant professor of electrical engineering, are helping develop a new generation of photovoltaic cells that produce more power and cost less to manufacture than what’s available today.

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Posted in Energy, solar power | Tagged , , , , | 61 Comments

Premature 400 PPM fail-a-bration

Posted on May 13, 2013 by

It seems we didn’t reach 400PPM last week after all. The data has been revised. Ooops.

‘Carbon dioxide measurements in the Earth’s atmosphere did not break the symbolic milestone of 400 parts per million at a Hawaiian observatory last week, according to a revised reading from the nation’s climate observers.

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Posted in Carbon dioxide | Tagged , , , , | 106 Comments

Quote of the week – Cook’s cartooning crash

Posted on May 13, 2013 by

qotw_cropped

Via Tom Nelson

Stranger than fiction: A little background on the cartooning and cricket blogging of John Cook of Skeptical Science, Al Gore’s Climate “Reality” drop partner.

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Posted in Quote of the Week | 21 Comments

The Chinese demonstrate that UHI has a real and essential effect on regional climate change

Posted on May 13, 2013 by

Study finds that urbanization has considerable influence on the regional climate change, they even blame proximity to air-conditioning as a factor.

Press release from Science China Press (full paper follows)

Urbanization and surface warming in eastern China

A recent study indicated that the urbanization in eastern China has significant impact on the observed surface warming and the temporal-spatial variations of urbanization effect have been comprehensively detected.

English: The skyline of Shanghai, China.

The skyline of Shanghai, China. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This work was led by YANG XiuQun, professor of meteorology in the Institute for Climate and Global Change Research, School of Atmospheric Sciences at Nanjing University. The article entitled “Urbanization and heterogeneous surface warming in eastern China” was published in Chinese Science Bulletin, 2013, No. 12.

Urbanization, as one of the most significant processes in land use/cover change, can not only alter surface vegetation distribution, but also affect surface energy and water balance. Some previous studies indicated that urbanization has little impact on surface warming. However, recent investigations have suggested that urbanization plays an essential role in regional climate change.

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Posted in Land use land cover change, UHI | Tagged , , , , , , , | 33 Comments

Wild claim from University of East Anglia

Posted on May 13, 2013 by

No mays, coulds, or mights here in this press release headline from UEA. They say “will“.  As usual, they assume nature so poorly equipped her creations that they can’t adapt. That’s some ballsy certainty.

Climate change will cause widespread global-scale loss of common plants and animals

More than half of common plants and one third of the animals could see a dramatic decline this century due to climate change – according to research from the University of East Anglia.

Research published today in the journal Nature Climate Change looked at 50,000 globally widespread and common species and found that more than one half of the plants and one third of the animals will lose more than half of their climatic range by 2080 if nothing is done to reduce the amount of global warming and slow it down.

This means that geographic ranges of common plants and animals will shrink globally and biodiversity will decline almost everywhere. Continue reading →

Posted in Extinction | Tagged , , , , , , , | 104 Comments

Are wind turbines killing off the whooping crane population?

Posted on May 13, 2013 by
The Whooping Crane

The Whooping Crane (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

An attempt to stimulate discussion about whether or not wind turbines could kill off all endangered whooping cranes in only five years, as some environmentalists suggest.

Guest post by Caleb Shaw

I am having trouble getting to the bottom of a serious issue, (or a serious issue for a bird lover like myself.) It may well be that wind turbines are killing endangered birds, and may lead to the extinction of the California Condor and the Whooping Crane.

Because wind turbines involve a great deal of capital, (not merely the big-bucks of fat-cats, but also and especially the political capital surrounding the save-the-world idea of Global Warming,) the bullying of media-warping power politics seems to be involved.  You can’t get a straight answer to a simple question.

All I want to know is whether or not the population of whooping crane has fallen by over a hundred, since wind turbines were erected in their flyways.

Continue reading →

Posted in wind power | Tagged , , | 91 Comments

Met Office Hadley Centre and Climatic Research Unit HadCRUT4 and CRUTEM4 Temperature Data Sets Adjusted/Corrected/Updated… Can You Guess The Impact?

Posted on May 12, 2013 by

Met Office – Hadley Center – Click the pic to view at source

Image Credit: Met Office Hadley Centre

By Just The Facts, Werner Brozek and Walter Dnes

The Met Office Hadley Centre and the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, have adjusted/corrected/updated their HadCRUT4 & CRUTEM4 data sets, the update occurred with the April data recently released. There does not appear to have been a press release and there was no mention of the forthcoming change in this April 15, 2013 Met Office press release that covers the data sets, however version update tags were placed in bold at the top of the HadCRUT4 page; Continue reading →

Posted in Climate data, MetOffice, Temperature | Tagged , , , , | 97 Comments

Open thread Sunday

Posted on May 12, 2013 by

open_thread

I have family duties today. In my last open thread I noted that “WUWT story submissions have been a dry hole lately”. I’m happy to report that I found out why and that wasn’t the case at all.  Continue reading →

Posted in Open Thread | 49 Comments

Lomborg: Californians are paying ridiculous subsidies for electric cars

Posted on May 12, 2013 by
English: The Tesla Model S is an all-electric ...

The Tesla Model S is an all-electric sedan. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 Guest post by Bjørn Lomborg

I’ve said electric cars get subsidized too much. Turns out I was wrong.

In California, they are subsidized ridiculously too much.

Tesla gets $45,000 for each car it sells in state and federal subsidies. The Tesla S starts at $69,000, so about 40% of its total cost is subsidies (Tesla isn’t making any big profits).

This is because the California Air Resources Board has mandated that zero emission vehicles should comprise 15% of new-car sales by 2025 — up from less than 1% now. This forces other car companies that can’t comply to pay for credits from Tesla.

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Posted in Government idiocy | Tagged , , , , , | 87 Comments

Is this what the beginning of glaciation looks like?

Posted on May 12, 2013 by

While ice fishing is still going on in some parts of Minnesota, other parts are having what looks like glacier advance in the back yards that is damaging some homes.

As for climate change worries, you can always figure out ways to keep cool, but getting out of the way of an advancing glacier is no easy task as this video shows. Watch this video of what happens in an “ice out” from the nearby lake Mille Lacs, you can actually watch the ice advance. In a matter of minutes the wind pushes the ice about 15 feet from the shore to the doors and windows of lakeside homes.

While this isn’t the same mechanism as ice-age type glaciation, it is fascinating to watch.

Continue reading →

Posted in Glaciers | 79 Comments

Still waiting for spring in Minnesota

Posted on May 11, 2013 by

Guest post by A. Scott

Even though we all know “weather is not “climate,” that rarely stops CAGW’s fiercest proponents, so we might as well have a little fun with it as well. This weekend is the 2013 Minnesota State Fishing Opener. And the joke around these parts is the most important equipment a fisherman needs this year is …. an ice auger.

Minnesota, like much of the country (as reported at WUWT here) is currently undergoing its own ‘little ice age’ with record late season snows (18″ in southeastern MN a week ago) and cold, and near record ice out dates on the State’s lakes. Lakes in the southern third of the State saw ice outs approaching new records and many lakes in the northern half of the state are still ice covered today.

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Posted in Weather | Tagged , | 109 Comments

The 400 PPM FUD Factory: T-shirts now available

Posted on May 11, 2013 by

400PPM_FUDSteve Milloy at JunkScience points out what is above the fold in the NYT today – FUD

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt

Here’s his scan of the front page at right:

Readers may recall my post What 400 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere looks like where I presented a meme to help people understand that 400 PPM is just a number. A lot of interest was expressed on this thread about t-shirts.

You ask, I provide, in a choice of sizes, styles, and colors:

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Posted in Climate News, Fun_stuff | Tagged , , | 114 Comments

IPCC’s AR5 Frankenscience – bringing proxies back from the dead

Posted on May 11, 2013 by

Josh writes:

Steve McIntyre has a hilarious post on the desperate measures needed to get some non peer reviewed papers into the IPCC’s AR5. I am not sure where the phrase ‘Frankenscience’ comes from but it seems appropriate for AR5 which already looks DOA.

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Posted in Humor, IPCC, IPCC AR5 leak, Satire | Tagged , | 12 Comments

A step in the right direction? Major shift in the UK’s government attitude to climate change

Posted on May 11, 2013 by

Story submitted by D.McNeil

I’d like to bring some points to the attention of your readers that were raised in an article in the Independent published on 11th May 2013  It would appear to indicate a major shift in the UK’s government attitude to climate change.

“The Government is facing an exodus of senior energy and climate change advisers amid growing concerns that decisive action to tackle global warming is falling victim to Treasury intransigence.”

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Posted in Climate News | Tagged , , , , , , , | 78 Comments

The Spencer Challenge to Slayers/Principia

Posted on May 11, 2013 by

Principia_bogusDr. Roy Spencer has made a challenge to the Slayers/Principia folks who keep insisting the greenhouse effect doesn’t exist at all. For example, see the front page claim at right from the Principia web page where they claim the greenhouse effect is “bogus”.

My view has always been that it exists. and has been effectively modeled as well as observed/measured (up to a point, so far I don’t know of a full scale measurement being done for the entire vertical column of the atmosphere), but likely isn’t the catastrophic issue portrayed by alarmists due to climate sensitivity likely being low.

Dr. Spencer’s challenge is quite simple and rooted in science; to prove their case, he simply wants them to make a simple model like this one below to demonstrate the absence of a greenhouse effect, while at the same time handling the measured energy budget of the Earth.
simple-model-of-sfc-temp-from-K-T

So far, he’s attracted lots of blowback rhetoric, but no serious takers. I doubt there will be.

Dr. Spencer sums it up pretty well as to why a cogent rebuttal is not likely:

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Posted in Carbon dioxide, Opinion | Tagged , , , | 44 Comments

Why Reanalysis Data Isn’t …

Posted on May 10, 2013 by

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

I was reading through the recent Trenberth paper on ocean heat content that’s been discussed at various locations around the web. It’s called “Distinctive climate signals in reanalysis of global ocean heat content”,  paywalled, of course. [UPDATE: my thanks to Nick Stokes for locating the paper here.] Among the “distinctive climate signals” that they claim to find are signals from the massive eruptions of Mt. Pinatubo in mid-1991 and El Chichon in mid-1982. They show these claimed signals in my Figure 1 below, which is also Figure 1 in their paper.

ORAS4 OHC joulesORIGINAL CAPTION: Figure 1. OHC integrated from 0 to 300 m (grey), 700 m (blue), and total depth (violet) from ORAS4, as represented by its 5 ensemble members. The time series show monthly anomalies smoothed with a 12 month running mean, with respect to the 1958–1965 base period. Hatching extends over the range of the ensemble members and hence the spread gives a measure of the uncertainty as represented by ORAS4 (which does not cover all sources of uncertainty). The vertical colored bars indicate a two year interval following the volcanic eruptions with a 6 month lead (owing to the 12 month running mean), and the 1997–98 El Niño event again with 6 months on either side. On lower right, the linear slope for a set of global heating rates (W m-2) is given.

I looked at that and I said “Whaaa???”. I’d never seen any volcanic signals like that in the ocean heat content data. What was I missing?

Well, what I was missing is that Trenberth et al. are using what is laughably called “reanalysis data”. But as the title says, reanalysis “data” isn’t data in any sense of the word. It is the output of a computer climate model masquerading as data.

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Posted in Ocean Heat Content | Tagged , , , , | 113 Comments

A mean study of Australian temperature

Posted on May 10, 2013 by

clip_image010Mean and reported “Mean” temperatures and the consequences of the difference

Guest essay by Tom Quirk

The convention in meteorology is to report mean temperatures as the average of minimum and maximum temperatures. This assumption has been tested using temperatures recorded every 30 minutes through the 24 hour day at various locations in Australia by the Bureau of Meteorology and made available on their website. The period examined is from the middle of March 2013 to the end of April 2013. Analysis shows that distortions are introduced by the use of thermometers that measure minimum and maximum temperatures and more importantly that the averaging of minimum and maximum temperatures does not represent the mean for the period examined. Whether this is also true for the entire year should be tested.

The Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) on its website (http://www.bom.gov.au/australia/index.shtml) provides temperatures recorded every 30 minutes through the 24 hour day at various locations in Australia, an example, Canberra is at http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDN60903/IDN60903.94926.shtml.

The convention in meteorology is to report daily, monthly or yearly mean temperatures as the average of minimum and maximum temperatures. This assumption can be tested using the BOM data.

13 locations around Australia have been selected for analysis. Figure 1 shows the average of the 30 minute intervals for 43 days in March and April for Cairns and Alice Springs. The figures show errors on the mean, not standard deviations. The data for the 13 sites divided into continental and coastal locations are shown in the Appendix.

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Posted in Climate data | Tagged , , , , , , , | 62 Comments

Mauna Loa hits 400 PPM of CO2, alarmists wail and gnash teeth, Earth survives

Posted on May 10, 2013 by

mauna-loa-week

Source: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/weekly.html

Al Gore calls for a day of prayer and reflection, and bothering your neighbor:

So please, take this day and the milestone it represents to reflect on the fragility of our civilization and and the planetary ecosystem on which it depends. Rededicate yourself to the task of saving our future. Talk to your neighbors, call your legislator, let your voice be heard. We must take immediate action to solve this crisis. Not tomorrow, not next week, not next year. Now.

Scientific American laments the plants

This measurement is just the hourly average of CO2 levels high in the Hawaiian sky, but this family’s figures carry more weight than those made at other stations in the world as they have faithfully kept the longest record of atmospheric CO2. Arctic weather stations also hit the hourly 400 ppm mark last spring and this one. Regardless, the hourly levels at Mauna Loa will soon drop as spring kicks in across the northern hemisphere, trees budding forth an army of leaves hungrily sucking CO2 out of the sky.

…

In the coming year, Scientific American will run an occasional series, “400 ppm,” to examine what this invisible line in the sky means for the global climate, the planet and all the living things on it, including human civilization.

Sorry, we already beat you to it when it comes to summing up what it means:

Continue reading →

Posted in Carbon dioxide | Tagged , , , , , , , | 292 Comments