All of Human civilization fits neatly into the current interglacial period. The development of agriculture, settlements and societies were all enabled by a beneficial climate for the last 10,000 years.
Interglacials usually average ~10,000 years so is our luck about to run out? It turns out that the answer is no, because we are very fortunate that human society has developed during an interglacial when the earth’s orbit has very low eccentricity.
Eccentricity is important because it regulates the strength of polar maximum summer insolation caused by precession of the equinoxes every 21,000 years. Precession determines the distance from the sun during a Polar summer. If summer coincides with the earth’s perihelion then summer insolation can be up to 20% higher than average. However if the earth’s orbit is nearly circular, as it is today, then precession has little effect at all. That is why we have about 15000 years left before cooling begins.
The future of hydraulic fracturing sounds a lot like science fiction. Fracking companies could eventually “beam up” oil and natural gas from the ground using microwaves, according to news reports.
Microwave fracking would zap shale formations with a beam as powerful as 500 household microwave ovens to release the valuable oil or gas. Experts estimate the first microwave fracking systems could be deployed in the field by 2017 and start producing oil by the end of that year.
The new tech would have major environmental advantages over conventional methods. Disposal of wastewater from fracking is the biggest objection to the process from environmentalists, who claim getting rid of the water can contaminate the ground and potentially cause very small earthquakes.
It would cause “a whole shift in the paradigm,” Peter Kearl, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of the microwave fracking company Qmast, told Ozy.com. “We don’t need water for our process and we don’t have wastewater to dispose of afterward.”
The high demand for the lithium ion batteries that power electric vehicles like those produced by Tesla Motors could potentially do more harm than good to the environment, according to a report Sunday from The Washington Post.
The electric vehicle automaker uses Panasonic batteries, which, according to the report, uses graphite derived from mines in China. The mines are raining graphite particles down on the residents of several villages in northeastern in the country.
Tesla told reporters its batteries do not include graphite from the Chinese company BTR, yet declined to identify its graphite source. Nearly 75 percent of the world’s graphite comes from the northeastern section of the China. The company’s refusal to explain where its graphite is produced could raise questions about the environmental soundness of its vehicles.
Dataism is the word coined by Yuval Noah Harari in his essay for an optimistic, practical implementation of Scientism.
Just as divine authority was legitimised by religious mythologies, and human authority was legitimised by humanist ideologies, so high-tech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a new universal narrative that legitimises the authority of algorithms and Big Data. This novel creed may be called “Dataism”. In its extreme form, proponents of the Dataist worldview perceive the entire universe as a flow of data, see organisms as little more than biochemical algorithms and believe that humanity’s cosmic vocation is to create an all-encompassing data-processing system — and then merge into it.
As an example, he says, “Every day I absorb countless data bits through emails, phone calls and articles; process the data; and transmit back new bits through more emails, phone calls and articles. I don’t really know where I fit into the great scheme of things, and how my bits of data connect with the bits produced by billions of other humans and computers.”
In 1982, NASA showed about 10 mm of sea level rise from 1955 to 1980. Now they show almost 40 mm of sea level rise during that same period. They quadrupled recent sea level rise by altering the data, or perhaps went back in time and took some new readings.
But quadrupling sea level rise wasn’t enough for NASA experts, so in 1993 they switched over to satellite measurements, which immediately doubled their already quadrupled sea level rise. Satellite orbits decay over time, and it doesn’t require a lot of decay to bring them 1.7 mm closer to earth over the period of a year.
James Hansen, NASA’s ex-climate chief at the forefront of the global warming movement, has a new paper that previews an apocalyptic future from#Climate Change unless we stop emitting all carbon dioxide. And he wants the fossil fuel industry to foot the trillion-dollar bill.
For Hansen, these types of papers are nothing new. He has been warning of Earth’s looming demise since 1988 when he told Congress that the Earth was heating up and it was our fault; he gave a ten-year temperature prediction that was off by 300 percent. Other predictions over his storied career were just as unsuccessful. Now the scientist-turned-activist wants fossil fuel companies held responsible and forced to pay for the so-called climate change problem via judicial activism. And he wrote this paper to support his contention.
Thermometers show Antarctica rapidly cooling. Sea ice is increasing. Glacial ice is increasing. But facts don’t suit the NASA climate agenda, so they simply changed the data.
You may have noticed in recent news headlines, one company “here” is getting sued by the government “there” for multi-billions and another company “there” is getting sued for similar billions by the government “here.”
Is it just a coincidence or something of a “tit-for-tat” game? Frankly, I’m not sure. Perhaps each side has some legitimate reasons to complain.
There is one thing for sure though: in the end, the consumer is going to pay more. Any individual that may have been wronged by one or the other is rarely going to see any re-compensation for any loss sustained. The governments – both here and there – are going to make sure of that. After all they are in the business of protecting you and, so they argue, any fine is due to them – not you.
Fewer than 10{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of Americans believe that human activity is causing the globe to warm, a position contrary to what many politicians embrace. (Perhaps that is why some people now use the term “climate change,” because the climate is always changing.) Because so few Americans believing in Anthropogenic Global Warming (man-caused climate change), several state attorneys general have chosen to investigate what they call “climate change deniers,” to build a criminal case of fraud. Apparently, if people do not believe that human activity is warming the globe, it must be because industry uses secret funds to mislead us.
Last spring, New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman, and 16 other attorneys general (15 Democrats and one independent) announced that they’re investigating energy companies and scientists who do not embrace global warming with the certainty of Euclidian geometry.
The report found that the biggest hindrance to unconventional reactors is bureaucratic delays in government approval processes and the public’s fear of nuclear power.
“Like any other nuclear power technology, this one is potentially compelling because the world desperately needs carbon-free sources of non-intermittent power,” the MIT Technology Review report states. “But fears about the safety of nuclear plants have made them so costly as to discourage investors.”
Paper Reviewed: Gervais, R. 2016. Anthropogenic CO2 warming challenged by 60-year cycle. Earth-Science Reviews155: 129-135.
In an important paper, Gervais (2016) fit several different time series of sea-level rise with a sinusoidal form having a period of approximately 60 years, which thereby confirmed “the cycle reported for the global mean temperature of the Earth,” and which also revealed that “the last maximum of the sinusoid coincides with the temperature plateau observed since the end of the 20th century.” And he further notes that “once this cycle is subtracted from observations, the transient climate response is revised downwards consistent with the latest observations.”
This elementary article could have, and should have, been written and published long ago. The condensation of water vapor to form dew or frost on solid natural and artificial surfaces is a commonly observed natural phenomenon. It is well understood that the latent heat released as water vapor condenses slows the radiational cooling of these surfaces during the diurnal temperature cycle.
There can be little doubt that the ability of atmospheric water vapor to condense (releasing its significant latent heat of condensation to its environment) limits the minimum possible temperature of the common diurnal temperature oscillation. The ability of this same atmospheric water vapor (and certain other atmospheric gases) to absorb portions of the radiation emitted by the earth’s surface has nothing to do with this minimum temperature limitation.
There is no end to agenda-driven government and environmental activist claims based upon speculative theories, contrived data, and demonstrably false computer modeling predictions that we are experiencing a known human-caused climate crisis.
The solutions, of course, are to abandon fossil fuel use in favor of heavily subsidized “free” and “renewable” alternatives; to expand the growth and overreach of energy regulatory agencies; to reward university departments that bend objectivity to secure research grants; to justify donations to environmental activist lobbies; and to enrich a host of politicians, prophets, and profiteers who cash in on “save the world” hype to fill campaign coffers and personal bank accounts.
Back in the late 1800s, Emperor Napoleon III of France offered a prize to anyone who could come up with a substitute for butter that would be cheap enough to be used by the lower classes. The winning spread, invented by a chemist named Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès and composed of rendered beef fat and skim milk, became known as margarine.
Mège-Mouriès may have won the prize, but he couldn’t fool the French into eating the stuff — not even the poor French — so he sold the patent to a Dutch company. Later that century, in the face of a beef-tallow shortage (I know; hard to believe), another chemist, from Binghamton, New York, came up with a way to manufacture margarine from a combination of animal and vegetable fats.
James Lovelock’s parting words last time we met were: “Enjoy life while you can. Because if you’re lucky, it’s going to be 20 years before it hits the fan.” It was early 2008, and the distinguished scientist was predicting imminent and irreversible global warming, which would soon make large parts of the planet uninhabitably hot or put them underwater. The fashionable hope that windfarms or recycling could prevent global famine and mass migration was, he assured me, a fantasy; it was too late for ethical consumption to save us. Before the end of this century, 80% of the world’s population would be wiped out.
His predictions were not easy to forget or dismiss. Sometimes described as a futurist, Lovelock has been Britain’s leading independent scientist for more than 50 years. His Gaia hypothesis, which contends that the earth is a single, self-regulating organism, is now accepted as the founding principle of most climate science, and his invention of a device to detect CFCs helped identify the hole in the ozone layer. A defiant generalist in an era of increasingly specialised study, and a mischievous provocateur, Lovelock is regarded by many as a scientific genius.
Written by Michael Kelly FRS FREng, Emeritus Prince Philip Professor of Technology, University of Cambridge
Let us be clear at the outset: the global climate is changing, and has always been changing. The earth has warmed by 1C over the last 150 years. That is not the issue. The issue is whether the human emissions of carbon dioxide since 1850 are heralding an imminent and certain global climate catastrophe that could be averted by engineering projects.
This book should leave any dispassionate reader deeply disturbed. It should be required reading for people in policy and politics who deal with these matters. No thought leader should be ignorant of the contents.
