Al Gore, known for wild rants about global warming, including one where his foul language earned him the description “mentally unstable,” is at it again.

Only this time he’s complaining about those who put up “barriers” to his agenda that critics say includes cracking down on carbon emissions, buying and selling credits for that activity and putting the American coal industry out of business.

“The ‘barriers’ to doing something about climate change are business and political interests that profit off of fossil fuels – ‘dirty energy that causes dirty weather,’” he said, according to an online report about a recent speech he made.

“He compared fake science from polluters stating that humans are not to blame for the climate to tobacco companies that used to hire actors to play doctors who denied cigarettes were dangerous,” the report said.

“That’s immoral, unethical and despicable,” he said of both.

Gore spoke recently to a crowd at the Stan Sheriff Center at the University of Hawaii.

Speaking largely to supporters and fans, Gore said climate change, the newest evolution of what started out as global warming, is getting worse.

The Civilbeat blog that reported on his visit to the island state said, “Gore’s talk was an updated version of the one he’s been giving for years and that he first laid out in his 1992 book ‘Earth In the Balance.’ The planet is in trouble because humankind burns too much coal and oil, which is trapping greenhouse gases and raising temperatures.”

Gore blamed that for “famine, drought, floods, refugees, species extinction, to name just a few.”

Gore claimed that the number of hotter days over the past 80 years has been growing “alarmingly disproportionate to the number of cooler days and days with average temperatures,” the report said.

Ancient plant material has been preserved in the glass formed by asteroids hitting the Earth, scientists report. The “frozen in aspic” appearance of what are apparently fragments of grass is spectacular enough.

But a team writing in Geology journal says that delicate organic chemicals have also been conserved inside.

Incredibly, the searing heat generated by the impacts was responsible for the remarkable preservation.The findings could even point to a new way of searching for past life on Mars.

The impact glasses examined in this study come from the Pampas of Argentina and have a range of dates under 10 million years old – in the Miocene and Holocene periods.

When objects from space slam into the ground they melt the target rocks. Hot material gets thrown out of the craters and, in these cases, it captures and traps shards of vegetation.

Scientists say the plant remains look very similar to the Pampas grass that still grows in the region today.

Prof Peter Schultz, from Brown University in Rhode Island, US, presented the work at last month’s Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in The Woodlands, Texas.

In their scientific paper, the Brown University geologist, R Scott Harris, Marcelo Zarate and others write that while space collisions can destroy life on local or global scales, “it can also preserve components of the local biology present at the time of impact”.

Had this comment on the “about” page:

I wandered onto this blog from a twitter link about Antony Watts. Still somewhat befuddled because I was under the impression he hunted down alarmists, not reinforced them. However what really felt like coming home (I’m a Physics grad) was the return to first principles with the laws of thermodynamics in that article – which seem to have been ditched in the climate cacophony. A perfect example of this prostitution of science is this classic from (un)skepticalscience.com:

https://www.skepticalscience.com/Second-law-of-thermodynamics-greenhouse-theory.htm

It is stunning that they parallel CO2 with a blanket, when anybody with a basic grasp of physics knows that the effect of a blanket, and indeed an actual greenhouse, is to block CONVECTION, which is a major process of cooling.

I still regularly have to reinforce the point that they are thermodynamic LAWS and anything in climate is a THEORY. Most don’t get it, and the BS touted by the likes of the link above are not going to make it easy to get the point across.

My reply (plus some more elaboration):

Well this may sound ridiculous, but you have to consider the scope of what we’re dealing with here. Read my “Religion of Climate Change” series. And watch Star Wars episodes 1 – 3. Seriously. Crazy, I know.

They’re creating a false reality. Outright alarmism is an obviously false reality, to anyone with the slightest sense of reason. Well, just think of the operation and the forces mustered to establish that false reality, promote it, fake it, have people running websites promoting it, having James Hansen promote it, etc. It’s kind of a big deal.

It all rests on the alarmist version of the greenhouse effect (see here for clarification). There is a real greenhouse effect inside a real greenhouse, and then there is the fake “alarming” greenhouse effect of climate pseudoscience, something pretended to be the same or similar to the real thing, but which it is not, and is not real in its own right either.

A new exhibition at the Science Museum in London features the personal archives of one of the most influential modern scientists; James Lovelock. ‘Unlocking Lovelock: Scientist, Inventor, Maverick’ tells the story of the British scientist’s work in medicine, environmental science and planetary science, and displays documents ranging from childhood stories, doodle-strewn lab notebooks and patents to letters from dignitaries such as former UK prime minister (and chemist) Margaret Thatcher. Also included are several of Lovelock’s inventions, such as the electron-capture detector that enabled the measuring of ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons in the atmosphere in the 1970s.

In a powerful public presentation at the Electric Universe Conference, Albuquerque, a leading Chemical Engineer showed that science proves carbon dioxide cannot operate as a thermostat in earths’ atmosphere.

Dr Pierre Latour, Vice Chair of Principia Scientific International , demonstrated to an assembled audience why our climate is an unmeasurable, unobservable and uncontrollable system. CO2 does not affect temperature; temperature affects CO2. There are no greenhouse gases in physics. CO2 is not a pollutant; it is green plant food. Global warming stabilized since 1998.

The Electric Universe Conference, All About Evidence. Albuquerque, March 24, 2014.

Summary. Earth’s temperature is a chemical process system. Review of control system engineering of Earth’s thermostat with anthropogenic CO2 in 1997 proved it will never work because it is an unmeasurable, unobservable and uncontrollable system. CO2 does not affect temperature; temperature affects CO2. There are no greenhouse gases in physics. CO2 is not a pollutant; it is green plant food. Global warming stabilized since 1998.

Purpose. Physics, chemistry, mathematics, engineering, economics, history and ethics are deployed to identify the barriers to designing the thermostat to control Earth’s atmospheric temperature by adjusting its CO2 input.

Method: People have beliefs and knowledge. Knowledge of nature is discovered by the scientific method: theory in the language of nature (mathematics), prediction and verification. Such discoveries are held to be true until falsified. I offer claims supported by credible evidence, settled science and warrant how one can know that they are true. Sound engineering requires no less. No opinion, no speculation, no controversy, no politics, no alarmist adjectives. When an unlicensed engineer resorts to name calling and threats I declare victory and move on.

Thermostat. A thermostat is a temperature controller. Like most control systems, it consists of a measurement, thermometer or thermocouple, comparison with a desirable setpoint setting creating an error, feeding that error back to a control algorithm that determines an adjustment to a manipulated variable, like combustion fuel flow, that corrects the error, holding it near zero. Control systems engineering is part of most engineering disciplines: chemical, mechanical, electrical, aeronautical, biological, civil.

Credentials. I built a thermostat to verify my “Time Optimum Control of Chemical Processes” PhD Thesis theory at Purdue in 1966; the first computer control loop in Shell Oil Co, a FCC regenerator thermostat at Deer Park Texas in 1967 and digital autopilots and spacecraft trajectory controls for NASA’s Apollo Program in 1968. I invented and commercialized hundreds of true boiling cut point thermostats for petroleum product quality in the HPI since 1970. I am a registered PE Chemical Engineer in Texas and Control System Engineer in California. I was Control Magazine Engineer of the Year 1999 and Purdue’s Outstanding Chemical Engineer 2007. I am a contributor to the US Senate Minority Report: 700 Scientists Dissent and Debunk Man-Made Global Warming, March 16, 2009. I personally financed this presentation; I have no financial incentive in the outcome. I seek no government or business funding. I am an AGW skeptic denier. Not my job to get the science right, just falsify what I can. Turns out I can do both.

Tom Friedman, a NY Times‘ columnist, is also Jewish. According to his Wiki-ography, he “attended Hebrew school five days a week until his Bar Mitzvah… He became enamored of Israel after a visit there in December 1968, and he spent all three of his high school summers living on Kibbutz Hahotrim, near Haifa.

He has characterized his high school years as ‘one big celebration of Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War.’ “

So it was a little surprising to hear Friedman call global-warming skeptics “climate deniers” in a recent interview with CNN’s Fareed, in reference to the latest report by the UN’s IPCC. Friedman says,

I was thinking, driving over here, what if the nightmare of the climate deniers came true and we really decided in America to take this seriously and act? What would we do? What is the nightmare that would happen?

This comes on the heels of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) denouncing Dr. Roy Spencer for calling climate-change alarmists “global-warming Nazis”, his response to the continued and explicit use of the word “denier” by pundits like Friedman. Spencer wrote:

I am calling out the ADL for not denouncing the widespread use of Nazi Holocaust imagery in public statements made by journalists, politicians, and even some scientists over the last 7+ years towards us global warming skeptics. … The ADL would appear to have decided (based upon their years of silence) that using Holocaust imagery is OK on one side of the global warming issue, but not the other.

Once again, the high priests of the UN/IPCC have forecast world starvation unless we mend our wicked ways. According to them, unless we curb our use of oil, gas, coal and meat, the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere will soar, the globe will heat up, and food production will plummet. But as the temperature record shows (see graph), there has been no global warming for over 17 years.

This is just a rerun of their previous failed forecasts based on academic theories and computer models.They should have asked practical nurserymen, farmers and meteorologists.Nurserymen would tell them that if you pump carbon dioxide into a greenhouse the plants grow faster, bigger, more drought-tolerant and more heat-tolerant. Therefore more carbon dioxide will produce more food.

See this Time-Lapse video showing effect of carbon dioxide on plant growth:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=P2qVNK6zFgE

Farmers would tell them that plants grow faster in the warmth of spring and summer and slower in winter. Any warming by carbon dioxide would tend to warm the higher latitudes so the snow line will shift, thus creating more arable land. It would also tend to produce warmer nights, thus reducing frost damage to crops and opening more land to frost-sensitive crops. Meteorologists would tell them that if global temperatures increase, evaporation from the vast oceans must also increase. What goes up with more evaporation must come down as more rain or snow. While some areas may become drier, a warmer world is on average a wetter world, producing more food.

Richard Tol resigned from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) because their latest report was too alarmist. His action proves that the latest IPCC Report (AR5) raised the level of alarmism without justification. He complained about the problem back in 2010 in a guest post for Roger Pielke’s Jr, but did nothing. Apparently they crossed some threshold of alarmism that scared adherents.

IPCC controllers realized the new level was required as polls showed little public concern for climate change, politicians were asking questions and, more alarming, cutting funding while global temperature continued its 17-year lack of increase. Failures of IPCC predictions (projections) indicate the failure of their science. Instead of re-examining the science they did what they’ve always done, increased the level of alarmism.

Tol as a member of IPCC since 1995 should have known the entire exercise was deliberately alarmist from the start. Apparently he did not know what was going on because he did not understand climatology. He simply accepted what the science people said in the IPCC Report The Physical Science Basis. Even those who knew the science accepted it without question as Klaus Eckert Puls courageously confessed.

“Ten years ago I simply parroted what the IPCC told us. One day I started checking the facts and data – first I started with a sense of doubt but then I became outraged when I discovered that much of what the IPCC and the media were telling us was sheer nonsense and was not even supported by any scientific facts and measurements. To this day I still feel shame that as a scientist I made presentations of their science without first checking it.”

What people don’t want you to know about electromagnetic fields: The industry doesn’t want to admit it, but the science is becoming clearer: Sustained EMF exposure is dangerous. Excerpted from “Overpowered: What Science Tells Us About the Dangers of Cell Phones and Other Wifi-age Devices” 

You may not realize it, but you are participating in an unauthorized experiment—“the largest biological experiment ever,” in the words of Swedish neuro-oncologist Leif Salford. For the first time, many of us are holding high-powered microwave transmitters—in the form of cell phones—directly against our heads on a daily basis.

Cell phones generate electromagnetic fields (EMF), and emit electromagnetic radiation (EMR). They share this feature with all modern electronics that run on alternating current (AC) power (from the power grid and the outlets in your walls) or that utilize wireless communication. Different devices radiate different levels of EMF, with different characteristics.

What health effects do these exposures have?

Therein lies the experiment.

The many potential negative health effects from EMF exposure (including many cancers and Alzheimer’s disease) can take decades to develop. So we won’t know the results of this experiment for many years—possibly decades. But by then, it may be too late for billions of people.

Today, while we wait for the results, a debate rages about the potential dangers of EMF. The science of EMF is not easily taught, and as a result, the debate over the health effects of EMF exposure can get quite complicated. To put it simply, the debate has two sides. On the one hand, there are those who urge the adoption of a precautionary approach to the public risk as we continue to investigate the health effects of EMF exposure. This group includes many scientists, myself included, who see many danger signs that call out strongly for precaution. On the other side are those who feel that we should wait for definitive proof of harm before taking any action.

Flu is actually a pretty nasty disease. People say they’ve got “the flu” when they’ve really only got a cold, but a genuine bout of influenza knocks you off your feet for several days, and is a major killer in the elderly; an outbreak in 2011 killed around 600 people.  But don’t worry! Since 2006, during the avian flu scare, the Government has spent £424 million stockpiling a drug called Tamiflu.

Unfortunately for the Government, and for elderly people, and for people who don’t want to spend a week in bed aching and sweating and vomiting, it seems that Tamiflu doesn’t work very well.

The Cochrane Library, the great centre for epidemiology and public health data, has carried out a huge meta-analysis, a study combining the data from dozens of smaller trials, into Tamiflu and another “neuraminidase inhibitor”, Relenza. Cochrane Reviews are hugely authoritative works, a sort of gold standard if you’ll forgive the cliché. And, five years after the UK and US began spending billions to buy millions upon millions of doses, the Cochrane Library has reported.

On average, flu symptoms last for seven days. With treatment with a neuraminidase inhibitor, they last, on average, for 6.3 days. Consider the front page held.

It’s worse than that for Tamiflu and Relenza. Even that limited improvement was unclear in children, and “there was no evidence of a reduction in hospitalisations or serious influenza complications (confirmed pneumonia, bronchitis, sinusitis or ear infection) in either adults or children,” says the Cochrane Review.

At least 120 computer generated nonsense papers have been reviewed and published in publications of the  Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and Springer, as well as conference proceedings. The fakes have just been discovered by a French researcher and are being withdrawn.

Cyril Labbé found a way to spot artificially-generated science papers, and published it his website and lo, the fakes turned up en masse. In the past, pretend papers have turned up in open access journals–this time the fake papers appeared in subscription based journals. But the man who caught the fakes says he cannot be sure he’s caught them all, because he couldn’t check all the papers behind paywalls.

According to Nature:

The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense.

Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in New York. Both publishers, which were privately informed by Labbé, say that they are now removing the papers.

Are you expecting a salacious, perhaps even a lascivious story? Sorry to disappoint you as this is not about sex but BED, an acronym that stands for “Banana Equivalent Dose” and it has nothing to do with the bananas’ prescribed curvature in Europe either (rescinded).

Anthony Watts is a Jester. So Mr. Watts posts a “guest article” from a person named Stephen Wilde, a person who has nothing to do with me or any of the Slayers, and who’s physics musings neither I nor the Slayers have ever promoted, and goes on to associate Mr. Wilde with us and calls Wilde’s musings “Slayer physics”.

Well, this is how this guy Anthony Watts operates – cheap lies.

In a later comment, Watts claims that the Slayers send him articles every week hoping he’ll post them.  This is another lie, we don’t send our own writing to Watts (this is Watts thinking himself a gatekeeper, it would appear), and never have, except when requested.  And when requested, look at how Watts responds:

http://climateofsophistry.com/2013/06/05/slaying-watts-with-watts/

It’s worth re-reading that article if you already have, just to remind yourself of what Anthony Watts believed he could engage in and get away with of sophistry and abuse of science.

So the guy challenges us to demonstrate the physics we’re talking about – essentially that cold doesn’t heat up hot! (seriously, this is what Anthony Watts has a difficult time understanding…) – and when we produce for him exactly what is requested, he ignores it and goes on a rant about light bulbs being able to produce more power than you put into them by having them shine on themselves, because we had had a picture of a light bulb in our article answer to him:

http://climateofsophistry.com/2013/05/13/slayers-putting-up-not-shutting-up/

Anthony Watts thought he could just ignore the physics and text of our response, and so he  just says “you guys have a picture of a light bulb in your article, so, if I turn on the light bulb and it gets hot, then it debunks your article”.

No that doesn’t make any sense at all and it doesn’t address the actual physics of the article, but do you think Anthony wants to care about that?  When pressed on the issue that in science experimentation, and pedagogy, it is important to understand the actual underlying physical principles at work in order to properly quantify the results of an experiment, Anthony Watts replied:

“And yet, in the diagram proposed in the essay by Postma, such fine details were not mentioned nor required. Demanding them now post facto doesn’t fly.”

So according to Anthony Watts’ understanding of how science works, demanding scientific accuracy after someone botches an experiment is not legitimate.  So in fact, according to Anthony Watts, if you botch an experiment, any subsequent criticism of it is invalid.  The experimenter wasn’t wrong, it is the person pointing out that the experiment was done incorrectly who is wrong. (!) I don’t think even a child would invent such a scheme.  Well, an insecure bully child would.

As you’ll see in the review of the article links, not only did Anthony Watts botch a very basic experiment, he and Curt Wilson didn’t even quantitatively analyse their results to see if more power was being produced than was being put it.  I mean the whole thing was a rather embarrassing expose of the bully mindset and its insecurities, and it would be embarrassing for Anthony Watts if he wasn’t just such a complete idiot.  That’s the advantage of being that stupid: you just don’t know when you’re making a fool of yourself.

Here, I’ll put in order the sequence of events and other articles I’ve had the misfortune of having to write involving Anthony Watts:

http://climateofsophistry.com/2013/05/13/slayers-putting-up-not-shutting-up/

http://climateofsophistry.com/2013/06/05/slaying-watts-with-watts/

http://climateofsophistry.com/2013/06/17/closing-with-watts/

http://climateofsophistry.com/2013/10/18/burning-watts-with-watts/

http://climateofsophistry.com/2013/11/08/anthony-watts-and-robert-brown-are-liars-or-at-least-very-stupid-idiots/

Dutch Professor Richard Tol has resigned from the Climate Panel of the UN. Professor Tol disagrees with the biased negative conclusions of the latest UN climate report. The consequences of climate change are being systematically over-estimated, according to him. 

“The Panel is directed from within the environment lobby and not from within the science.”

At first glance this simple question appears to be lifted from a first year, undergraduate class in meteorology, because everyone who has even a rudimentary understanding of the thermodynamics of the atmosphere knows that water vapor decreases the lapse rate, i.e., the rate at which the air temperature changes with altitude—ascending air cools at a certain rate as it “does work” against its progressively less dense surroundings and descending air warms at a certain rate as its progressively more dense surroundings “does work” on it.

            As countless weather balloon soundings have shown water vapor decreases this lapse rate and it has even been observed that this attenuation becomes more acute as both the temperature and the humidity increase.  One wonders then why the country’s most prestigious universities in classes across the hall are teaching their students that water vapor increases the lapse rate via a hypothetical “greenhouse effect”.

Princeton         “The greenhouse effect is a process by which thermal radiation from a planetary surface is absorbed by atmospheric greenhouse gases, and is re-radiated in all directions. Since part of this re-radiation is back towards the surface, energy is transferred to the surface and the lower atmosphere. As a result, the temperature there is higher than it would be if direct heating by solar radiation were the only warming mechanism.”

University of California, Riverside

“What is the greenhouse effect?

“This refers to the retention of the sun’s warmth in the Earth’s lower atmosphere by greenhouse gases. These gases (primarily carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide) act as a thermal blanket for the planet, warming the surface to a life-supporting average of 59 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees Celcius).”

Texas A&M University

“55{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the heat that warms the atmosphere is quickly re-radiated radiated back to the earth (324 W/m2). This warms the earth and the lower atmosphere.”

Columbia University

“Some of the emitted radiation [from the surface] passes through the atmosphere and travels back to space, but some is absorbed by greenhouse gas molecules and then re-emitted in all directions. The effect of this is to warm the Earth’s surface and the lower atmosphere. Water vapor (H2O) and carbon dioxide (CO2) are the two largest contributors to the greenhouse effect.”

Boston University

“We have demonstrated how the ‘natural’ greenhouse effect (e.g. H2O, natural CO2) elevated surface temperature.  Next time we will extend this simple model to show how the addition of greenhouse gases increases surface temperature.”  

            Now, you might be saying, “What are you talking about?  None of these definitions mentions a ‘lapse rate’,” but notice that each one of these definitions of the “greenhouse effect” hypothesis asserts that “greenhouse gases” only warm the “surface and the lower atmosphere.”  Not one of them asserts that “greenhouse gases” warm the entire troposphere or the upper troposphere.  Doing so, of course, would be foolish since the upper troposphere in the mid-latitudes is commonly as cold as -60 °C and can be as cold as -80 °C!  By default then, when one asserts that there exists a thermodynamic process within the atmosphere that only warms the lower troposphere and not the upper troposphere one is asserting that that process increases the lapse rate—the temperature differential between lower tropospheric air and upper tropospheric air that is quantified in °C/km.  Indeed, it has even been suggested by some that if there were no “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere there wouldn’t even be a lapse rate.

            “Without the destabilization provided by the greenhouse effect, convective overturning would slow and quite possible cease altogether. The atmosphere would eventually become isothermal, as the full depth of the atmosphere would achieve the same temperature as the surface through thermal conduction; without IR emission, the middle and upper troposphere would have no way to cool itself in the face of this heating.” Roy Spencer

            The mental construct that “greenhouse gases” either create or at least augment the lapse rate can also be seen in this mathematical hypothetical being taught at Boston University . . .