Our energy and environment deserve better – in South Africa and Qatar
Guest post by Dr. Kelvin Kemm
A few weeks ago, perhaps as a prologue to the “global warming disaster” convention in Doha, Qatar, South Africa’s Department of Environment Affairs took out a full-page advertisement in our country’s newspapers, promoting National Marine Week.
The ad showed a map of the Antarctic continent, from above the pole, surrounded by the vast blue Southern Ocean. It also promoted South Africa’s new Antarctic research vessel, SA Agulhas II.
The advertisement’s text mentioned the massive Antarctic Circumpolar Current, which is responsible for distributing vital nutrients to the world’s oceans. It noted that the truly massive quantities of phytoplankton found in the ocean are vital marine building blocks in ocean processes. All that is true, and I certainly applaud efforts to protect the environment and promote National Marine Week and our country’s research efforts.
But then, sadly, the ad’s discussion of physics content went off the rails. Referring to phytoplankton, it said “these microscopic creatures also use carbon to create energy.” Wrong!
The most basic law of thermodynamics says energy is neither created nor destroyed, but merely converted from one form to another. The only way to “create” energy is via a nuclear process, whereby matter is converted to energy in a nuclear reaction, as Einstein famously postulated over a century ago. Nuclear processes operate outside the laws of thermodynamics, but there is certainly no nuclear process going on in phytoplankton.
I could have lived with that slip up in the physics. But it got worse – much worse. The ad went on to blame global warming for upsetting the phytoplankton. In a declaration straight out of Alice in Wonderland, it asserted: “The increase in surface temperature over Antarctica from climate change is having a catastrophic knock-on effect, depleting phytoplankton stocks, melting the Antarctic ice sheet and causing an alarming reduction in all marine life.”
First, to the best of my knowledge, there has been no “alarming reduction in all marine life.” None of my colleagues are aware of it. Second, the surface temperature over Antarctica is not increasing.
In fact, a new record has just been attained. Antarctic sea ice has just reached an all-time record for total acreage. Day 265 of the year 2012 set an all time record, and then on day 266 that record was broken. The days 265 to 270 were the six highest Antarctic sea ice extent days of all time.
The environment department then compounded these errors by committing the unforgivable scientific sin of claiming a supposed increase in surface air temperature over Antarctica “is having a catastrophic knock-on effect” – then providing no evidence to back up its assertion and not telling readers what the alleged knock-on effect is.
I cannot even begin to imagine how this knock-on is supposed to alter the Circumpolar Current, which in turn is somehow supposed to affect the “energy creation” capabilities of phytoplankton. Come off it, folks.
There is so much good Antarctic science to be proud of – and, for that matter, really fine South African scientific achievements in the Antarctic to brag about. That the DEA would feel compelled to celebrate National Maritime Week by resorting to phytoplankton scares supposedly related to nonexistent Antarctic heating is beyond mystifying.
Meanwhile, over the last few months, newspaper stories have told of reduced sea ice extent at our planet’s other pole, the Arctic. Terms like “alarming rate” of ice depletion were bandied about casually. Yes, there were reductions in Arctic sea ice cover.
However, on September 18, a video posted by NASA on its website showed that a large and long lasting Arctic cyclone “wreaked havoc on the Arctic sea ice cover,” by “breaking up sea ice.” The unusual reduction in Arctic sea ice cover was due to high winds – not to any warming of the Arctic or global warming in general. NASA’s belated analysis demonstrated that a large section of ice north of the Chukchi Sea was cut off by the churning storm, broken up and pushed south into warmer waters, where it melted.
The storm also broke up other ice, accelerating drifting and melting elsewhere. Reuters finally reported that “NASA says a powerful cyclone formed off the coast of Alaska in early August and moved toward the centre of the Arctic Ocean, weakening the already thin sea ice as it went.”
NASA noted that this was an “uncommon event” and that there have been only about eight storms of similar strength during August in 34 yearsof satellite records. However, a major storm every four years is not all that “uncommon.” Paul A. Newman, Chief Scientist for Atmospheric Sciences at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre, added that such wind disturbances produce many effects and can also lift warmer water from the depths of the Arctic Ocean up to the surface to accelerate melting.
For some reason – probably having to do with its regular promotion of “dangerous manmade global warming” claims – the storm story was barely mentioned in the mainstream popular media. By contrast, the “alarming ice cover reduction” narrative was covered extensively.
Now jump back in time five years, to December 12, 2007. On that date Associated Press writer Seth Borenstein distributed an article that stated: “An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer – a sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point. One scientist even speculated that summer sea ice could be gone in five years.”
Well, five years have come and gone. Borenstein was dead wrong. Does anyone suppose the AP will now publish an apology, admitting that its “science writer” was on thin ice when he made this outlandish statement, and saying he should not have tried to scare thepublic like that?
Perhaps the answer can be found in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.
“There’s no use trying,” Alice said. “One can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Especially with the Doha climate change confab in full swing, taxpayers, newspaper readers – and anyone dreaming of a better life through reliable, affordable energy – deserves more honest reporting and more science-based energy and environmental policies than they have been getting.
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Dr Kelvin Kemm is a nuclear physicist and business strategy consultant in Pretoria, South Africa. He is a member of the International Board of Advisors of the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), based in Washington, DC (www.CFACT.org). Dr. Kemm received the prestigious Lifetime Achievers Award of the National Science and Technology Forum of South Africa.
@ur momisugly Doug: Interestingly prophetic quotes from Carroll/Dodgson – thanks.
I pick up on “Alice” references because I once lived in the house originally occupied by Alice Liddell’s governess. (Damask wallpaper still attached to the walls in some places.)
“The days 265 to 270 were the six highest Antarctic sea ice extent days of all time.”
Say what ??????? Maybe within our very limited records.
but saying something like that makes him sound like a warmist in reverse.. not a good look !!
Ben Cubby, “Environmental Editor” of the Sydney Morning Herald seems to think “More of the sun’s heat reaches the earth because of human contributions to global warming” in a report “Where even the earth is melting” – about permafrost of course. Alice couldn’t understand what was happening either.
The lead author of the paper referred to says
“We’re seeing biological activity in various places in Alaska that’s much more active than I would have expected, and also much more variable from place to place … There are changes as much as 10 to 12 parts per million for CO2 – so that’s telling us that the local biology is doing something like five or six years worth of change in the space of a few hundred metres.”
Parse that for bovine excrement.
He thinks they’ve found the fingerprint of permafrost melt
“What we can say is that methane is significantly elevated in places – about 2000 parts per billion, against a normal background of about 1850 parts per billion”.
That’s “significantly elevated”? They’ve found a bit more CO2 and a bit more methane, in a place where one might expect a bit more of both in normal circumstances. We might as well all pack it in now then? Jump off the nearest bridge? Wait – wouldn’t that add to sea-level rise? Damned if we do, damned we don’t.
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/where-even-the-earth-is-melting-20121127-2a5tp.html
Vukcevic, your website is not user friendly. Please create (or link if you already did it) a thesis. I’m trying to understand why your message about the magnetic fields is important. I see lots of charts and data, curve fits and equations, but no big picture. What’s your point?
“these microscopic creatures also use carbon to create energy.” Wrong!
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C’mon you guys, they create energy for themselves by transforming the energy from the sun and the energy stored in carbon. And there is a very good reason they do it in the upwelling zones.That upwelling water is nearly fizzing with CO2.
Just on TV3 news tonight poles melting 3 times faster now than 20 years ago.
New laws coming in here in New Zealand that homes built near the sea have to
have the floor 1.2 mtre above the ground.
This is an over-reaction to conversational language. The plankton use carbon to create energy in a form they can use. Not unlike what happens when you go to a bar and knock back buffalo wings all night. Nobody thinks you are going to create energy in the raw from buffalo wings although you may from the chili. I give this rant a 2 – good rhythm but you’re banging the wrong drum.
Finally, a real scientist (not Lewandowski) from University of WA wins an award: http://pindanpost.com/2012/11/30/winning-with-science/
Same reason Nature publish papers depicting hockey stick graphs. Nothing published is gospel, not even “peer-reviewed” studies.
I just sent a disparaging email to the South Africa’s DEA with a link to this posting. You can find the Media contacts for the DEA at http://www.environment.gov.za/?q=content/contacts/media-contacts
cementafriend says:
……
Thanks.Yes, all working life in practical engineering (strongly biased towards electro-magnetism).
Sarcasm says:
vukcevic …… What’s your point?
Yes, website is not user friendly. Not everything found in the data is immediately translatable to a simple theory or even hypothesis. My point is: no strong data correlation of two physical events should be automatically excluded, just because I’m not in position to give a full scientifically verifiable account of the process that may be taking place.
NASA scientists also have a hunch that there is something in the geo-magnetic correlations :
“One possibility is the movements of Earth’s core (where Earth’s magnetic field originates) might disturb Earth’s magnetic shielding of charged-particle (i.e., cosmic ray) fluxes……Other possibilities are that some other core process could be having a more indirect effect on climate, or that an external (e.g. solar) process affects the core and climate simultaneously. “
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/earth20110309.html
You might ask: “What’s the NASA’s point?”
Climate change cannot be responsible for changes in climate. That is what constitutes climate change. Likewise, global warming cannot be caused by, or be the cause of, rising temperatures. My height is not caused by the distance from my head to my feet.
Interesting post. I also live in Pretoria. I think I heard the honourable dr. on radio here the other day. Not that I agreed with him then – I think you all know that am not particularly in favor of nuclear energy. But here it seems we can agree on antarctica – there is no warming there. In fact there is no warming anywhere. What we have is pockets of warming here and there due to the increased clouds and weather systems which in turn is due to the increase in cooling. It looks like we are now near at the bottom of the curve.
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/
but we are not there yet……
Henry@Just the facts
Could you provide me with the raw data of the station of that graph (of surface temps for Antarctica). I could not find any station on antarctica with complete daily temp. records. I am particularly interested in looking at maxima data.
There’s no warming of the Southern Ocean – in fact it almost seems to have gone trough a step-like cooling during 2005-2008: http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/13-southern.png
cementafriend says:
November 29, 2012 at 5:23 pm
William Sears, you are right that is why Engineers (especially Chemical Engineers) have a discipline called heat and mass transfer. -something no so called “climate scientist” understands….
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Boy have you got that right!
dp says:
November 29, 2012 at 10:09 pm
This is an over-reaction to conversational language. The plankton use carbon to create energy in a form they can use…
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It is STILL WRONG. What the plankton are doing is using carbon (CO2) to STORE the energy from the sun in a usable form for future use. They are not CREATING energy.
For example for the glucose produced: C6H12O6 + 6O2 —> 6CO2 + 6H2O + energy
vukcevic says:
November 30, 2012 at 2:08 am
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Did you see this? Giant Breach in Earth’s Magnetic Field Discovered
And they keep telling us the “Science is settled”
There are so many potential flaws in the whole polar ice thing.The methodology for arriving at the sea ice numbers is fatally flawed because it ignores the effects of the wind and especially in Antarctica the effect of the currents. When glacial ice enters the ocean it increases sea level but then it cools the sea water causing a lowering of sea level. Since the ice melt water is fresh water it cools the sea surface. It is also less dense preventing warmer water from rising to the surface. None of which we read about in the media.
No they do not. This is what one calls “internal energy” in thermodynamics.
Could be inadvertently useful if NZ starts seeing regular heavy snow.
Hi Ms Combs
Thanks. One more stone into the foundation of a new approach to the climate science; he says forever hopeful.
I’ve been going on for some time now about geomagnetic storms, North Atlantic Precursor (geological records) and the AMO (N. Atlantic SST) correlations
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SST-NAP.htm
they aren’t perfect, but again neither is the data, in addition only CMEs which hit the Earth with a leading edge that is magnetized north open a breach and load the magnetosphere with plasma starting a geomagnetic storm.
Note disparity between number of geomagnetic storms and the SSN
http://www.bu.edu/cawses/images/image020.jpg
When someone starts out an argument by discussing conservation of energy and reveals immediately a lack of understanding of same by implying that this conservation law applies differently in “nuclear reactions” than in other reactions, “ Nuclear processes operate outside the laws of thermodynamics” it is hard to focus on the rest of the argument. Dr. Kemm seems to think E=MC2 applies only to nuclear reactions but it applies to all reactions and all systems. Compressed springs are heavier than uncompressed ones, wound up clocks are more massive than run down clocks, hot objects are more massive than cold ones, the output molecular products in exothermic chemical reactions weigh less than the input molecular molecules, etc, etc.
The shudderingly low level of grasp of physics by the typical AGW religion believer is past incredible, it’s got to be nothing more than an attempt to see how big a mob of stupid, evil people can be built, using mass communications principles, and a government employee’s lack of fear of fraud laws.
These people claim there’s no way to look into the atmosphere and actually check whether it’s gotten hotter.
These people claim there’s no instrument on earth to check whether a narrow spectrum of low power infrared light has increased in the planet earth’s atmosphere.
These people claim there’s no way to check whether the troposphere where about 50% of all man’s aviation takes place, has gotten on average, a whole lot warmer the past 40 years.
These people claim there is magically undetectable radiation being deflected down toward the ground a night and say when man put liquid nitrogen-cooled infrared detectors out on the ground at night, that ‘yew awl jus don’t wawnuh buhLEEvE!.’
These people believe in a universe where a man invented a ‘whole new branch of mathematics’ only to have his algorithms leaked accidentally after sharing online with a cohort and discovered to make hockey sticks from calibration data; and anyone can do it, it’s well known –
yet the followers of the AGW religion are utterly silent on why ‘climate math’ hasn’t been proclaimed on math sites to be the greatest thing since invention of electricity: a WHOLE NEW BRANCH of MATH.
These people believe there is a magic gas hiding magic infrared from every instrument known to man, but that the magic hockey stick math and some bore holes, say it has never been this hot.
And the entire array of mankind’s raw instruments – infrared astronomy, sensors on military and other high flight commercial aircraft where human life’s the gold standard for reliability and accuracy in instrumentation – find an instrument bank not jiggled by these government employees’ ‘magical math’ – not one of these can detect any more heat in the atmosphere than normal – but everybody who doesn’t want to put these government employees’ policies into place are ‘murderous child hating rabble.’
But they don’t dare show their work because either ‘all you would want to do is find something wrong with it,’ or ‘I might need these proprietary algorithms for something MORE important, later.’
More important than the impending doom of civilization.
From magical low energy light in the atmosphere not one infrared telescope can find one trace of.
And which not one thermometer on any instrument cluster not jiggled by these very government employees, shows exists.
And it doesn’t matter that it’s not actually happening, the thing is, we should all be scared.
And install the policies these government employees want, making the breath you breathe out, pollution, while men in nuclear subs have lived with 4,000 ppm carbon dioxide levels in submarine air for fifty years.
But when you breathe out, or start a fire, it’s a pollutant and you have to be taxed on that. Because of your ‘carbon usage.’
It’s crime.
Pure
Simple
Crime.
Here’s the details on Antarctic ice.
Sorry, forgot to paste the link.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2012/09/19/antarctic-sea-ice-sets-another-record/