Perfluorotributylamine (PFTBA) is the latest greenhouse gas scare (GHGS). The media and web sites like countercurrents.org  are full of statements like “PFTBA is 7,100 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at warming the Earth” according to University of Toronto scientists who claim to have found an average of 0.18 parts per trillion of PFTBA in the Toronto air samples.

The year 1981 was a big one in my business life. It was the year Paul Allen and I incorporated Microsoft in our home state of Washington.

As it turns out, 1981 also had big implications for my current work in health, development, and the environment. Right when Paul and I were pulling all-nighters to get ready for the release of the MS-DOS operating system for the brand new IBM-PC, two rival professors with radically divergent perspectives were sealing a bet that the Chronicle of Higher Education called “the scholarly wager of the decade.”

This bet is the subject of Yale history professor Paul Sabin’s new book. The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth’s Future provides surprising insights for anyone involved in addressing the world’s “wicked problems.” Most of all, it gave me new perspective on why so many big challenges get bogged down in political battles rather than being focused on problem-solving.

So what was the bet? University of Illinois economist Julian Simon challenged Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich to put his money where his mouth was and wager up to $1,000 on whether the prices of five different metals would rise or fall over the next decade. Ehrlich and Simon saw the price of metals as a proxy for whether the world was hurtling toward apocalyptic scarcity (Ehrlich’s position) or was on the verge of creating greater abundance (Simon’s).

Enough to power patio heaters for the next few millennia

Images taken from the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn have given the clearest pictures yet of the planet’s largest moon Titan and revealed vast seas of methane on the north pole that are more than 200 times larger than all the proven hydrocarbon reserves here on Earth.

We have to kill eagles in order to save them. That’s now the official policy of the U.S. Interior Department. On Friday, the agency announced that it would grant some wind-energy companies permits that will allow them to kill or injure bald and golden eagles for up to 30 years without penalty.

The move is an unprecedented gift to the wind-energy industry, which has been lobbying for the 30-year permit for several years. Shortly after the deal was announced, the wind-energy lobby issued a statement that would make George Orwell proud. An official with the American Wind Energy Association declared that this “is not a program to kill eagles.” It is, he claimed, “about conservation.”

Well then. We can now rest easy. Big Wind is saving eagles by getting permits to kill them.

Dozens of environmental groups, including the American Bird Conservancy, the Conservation Law Center, and the National Audubon Society, opposed the deal. Under the headline “Interior Dept. Rule Greenlights Eagle Slaughter at Wind Farms,” Audubon issued a statement calling it “a stunningly bad move” and quoting the group’s president and CEO, David Yarnold: “Instead of balancing the need for conservation and renewable energy, Interior wrote the wind industry a blank check.” He called it “outrageous” that “the government is sanctioning the killing of America’s symbol, the Bald Eagle.”

In a recent article in the Guardian entitled, “How journals like Nature, Cell and Science are damaging science,” with a subtitle reading, “The incentives offered by top journals distort science, just as big bonuses distort banking,” Randy Schekman, one of the editors of eLife, starts out with a plaintive and humble “ I am a scientist.” With such a demure start, it might seem surprising that the article itself devolves immediately afterwards into a piece that has inspired incredulous ridicule in emails, on Twitter, and in the comments on the article — not because the initial statement is false, but because the very next statement is laughable given the author and the context:

Mine is a professional world that achieves great things for humanity. But it is disfigured by inappropriate incentives. The prevailing structures of personal reputation and career advancement mean the biggest rewards often follow the flashiest work, not the best. Those of us who follow these incentives are being entirely rational – I have followed them myself – but we do not always best serve our profession’s interests, let alone those of humanity and society.

Schekman shared in this year’s Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, certainly one of the “biggest rewards” in science. (Commendably, he donated his prize money to his university.)

Luckily, when a prize-winner of Schekman’s caliber complains about the incentives in science, people sit up and take notice. Unfortunately for him, most responses were incredulous or derisive.

The cover story of the November 25, 2013 Canadian weekly magazineMacleans pictures self-appointed Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki. The caption reads,“Environmentalism Has Failed”“David Suzuki loses faith in the cause of his lifetime.”

Suzuki doesn’t realize he‘s the cause of the failure as a major player in the group who exploited environmentalism and climate for a political agenda. Initially most listened and tried to accommodate, but gradually the lies, deceptions and propaganda were exposed. The age of eco-bullying is ending. Typically Suzuki blamed others for the damage to the environment and climate but now he blames them for not listening to him. He forgets that when you point a finger at someone three are pointing back at you.

Environmentalism was what academics call a paradigm shift, which Thomas Kuhn defines as “a fundamental change in approach or underlying assumptions.” It was a necessary new paradigm. Everybody accepts the general notion it is foolish to soil your own nest and most were prepared to participate. Most were not sure what it entailed or how far it should go. Extremists grab all new paradigms for their agenda but then define the limits for the majority by pushing beyond the limits of the idea. Environmentalism and the subset climate are at that stage pushed there by extremists like Suzuki. Instead of admitting the science is wrong they double down and make increasingly extreme statements, just like the IPCC. It underscores the political rather than the scientific agenda. For example, Suzuki, apparently frustrated that politicians were not listening to his demands for action on climate change said they should be jailed.

What is an appropriate and safe noise level for wind turbines? Well, based on the latest revelation from the wind industry itself, it appears that a stricter noise limit is long overdue. This is because the impacts on human health may be shown to be more serious than previously believed (or acknowledged!).

Principia Scientific International releases the latest on this in an email from acoustician, Mike Stigwood (below):

Wind Farm – Amplitude Modulation controls finally accepted at 3dB

Dear all, 

Recent research presented at three Planning Inquiries that were conducted in September, October and November (Starbold, Bryn Lleweln and Shipdham – decisions awaited)  have hopefully exposed the misconceived arguments made by the Industry’s acousticians’ which have successfully avoided controls over wind farm noise impact for many years.      

After more than 4 years of smoke screens, obfuscation and erroneous objections raising unrealistic concerns and placing barriers in the way of necessary controls over the wind farm noise called “Excess Amplitude Modulation”, industry acousticians have finally admitted a planning condition is ” necessary” and “reasonable”.

Excess AM is now shown to be neither rare nor only causing minor effects as claimed over the last few years, arguments that have successfully blocked planning controls leaving many communities exposed to serious noise impact.  Research by ourselves and the Japanese have exposed this as a common and serious problem. 

Jan Zeman provides a telling appraisal applying official raw data of global surface temperatures to refute alarmist claims made in a recently trumpeted paper by Cowtan and Way. Authors’ claims of increased warming are controverted by compelling empirical evidence suggesting an emergent cooling trend instead.

Zeman’s analysis shows Cowtan and Way may have intentionally inserted a warming bias to fill a gap in data coverage of the tropical and polar regions. Principia Scientific International has pleasure in publishing Zeman’s damning full report below:

SIGNS OF COOLING

by Jan Zeman

Because there was a lot of publicity around the Cowtan and Way 2013 paper I decided to look into the issue, although, I note, it is not main concern of this article and it only makes suitable pretext to examine what is really going on with the global temperatures recently.

I was not much interested in their calculations and methods (since I’m not much interested in methods of data torture. Besides, they have already been scrutinized by much more knowledgeable people), but rather in the following questions:

Where did they obtain such data that would support a “two and a half times greater” rise of global temperature anomaly “trends starting in 1997 or 1998” in their “hybrid global reconstruction” when compared to the HadCRUT4 global temperature anomaly data-set, what such data really show and whether such data agree with other data or not?

The main rationale of their analysis seems to me to be that there is some missing coverage for the HadCRUT4 global temperature anomaly dataset “with the unsampled regions being concentrated at the poles and over Africa” and that it is the alleged reason why the HadCRUT4 dataset outcomes are purportedly biased, allegedly showing less warming than there is in reality. The main result of their analysis widely publicized was the bold red global trend. Because of this, the first thing I looked for was whether there actually are other data covering the regions and what trends one can find there.

Tropics

For starters, let’s see a comparison of HadCRUT4 and satellite lower troposphere data for the tropics.

(Note that I chose trend period exactly October-October to avoid potential disputes about the seasonal variations and cherry-picking. The data and calculations are available here.)

What we immediately see on the graph is that the HadCRUT4 trend 1997-present for the tropics (30S-30N) is flat (but it is slightly rising for the whole globe ~0.046°C per decade). We also see that both the UAH (the dataset Cowtan and Way likely used for their “reanalysis“ of the HadCRUT4 dataset) and the RSS satellite records show a descending temperature trend in the 1997-present period for the tropics. The only satellite data which show a rising temperature trend in the tropics is the UAH lower troposphere-land.

German scientists contend that two natural cycles will combine to lower global temperatures throughout the 21^stCentury.

The scientists show that there is an approximate 200-year solar cycle, supported by historical temperature data and proxy data from stalagmites in caves.  “The solar activity agrees well with the terrestrial climate. It clearly shows in particular all historic temperature minima.”

There is also an approximate 65-year cycle of the Atlantic/Pacific oscillation (AMO/PDO) which is well-established by multiple lines of observations.

The 200-year solar cycle has just passed its maximum and will decline during the 21^st Century.  It is at least in part responsible for the warming of the last decades of the 20^th Century. The AMO/PDO cycle is also beginning its cool phase and will reach a minimum in 2035.

The scientists say that “Non-periodic processes like a warming through the monotonic increase of CO2 in the atmosphere could cause at most 0.1°C to 0.2°C warming for a doubling of the CO2 content, as it is expected for 2100.”  This positive forcing will be overwhelmed by the stronger negative forcing of natural cycles.  They conclude that “the global temperature will drop until 2100 to a value corresponding to the “little ice age” of 1870.” Read more here.  Below is a graph of historical temperatures and temperature predictions.

This work has been published in two papers:

H.-J. Lüdecke, A. Hempelmann, and C.O. Weiss: Multi-periodic climate dynamics: spectral analysis of long-term instrumental and proxy temperature records, clim. past, 9, 447-452, 2013

F. Steinhilber and J. Beer, Prediction of solar activity for the next 500 years, Jour. Geophys. Res. Space Phys., Vol. 118, 1861-1867 (2013)

Solar Flux is not Q

This was touched on in the last post, but the steel greenhouse deserves a full logical physics treatment of heat flow to explain what actually happens and why the radiative greenhouse effect believers have it wrong.

First I just want to repeat something.  The radiative heat flow equation

Q = A*σ(Th4 – Tc4)

does not stand for conservation of energy where Q is the solar energy, and the hot term is the Earth’s surface and the cool one the atmosphere.  Conservation of solar energy does not occur between the surface and the atmosphere.  Why would solar energy be conserved as a difference in flux, as a heat flow, between the surface and atmosphere?  This reinterpretation of the equation has no logical or physical basis.  Solar energy is conserved to the outside of the system, not inside between the surface and atmosphere.  I just don’t know why this reinterpretation of the heat flow equation would have been invented.  The hot and cool term represent sources of energy, and Q is the local difference between them resulting in heat flow; the solar heating has to be one of the sources, on the right hand side of the equation, because it is a source, and the energy from the Sun is not dependent upon the difference between two other arbitrary and undefined sources.

You see, one of the ways to create science sophistry, is to simply misinterpret or worse lie about what the physics equations mean.  It is as simple as that is all they have to do, is lie about what an equation means, because most people don’t have the physics training to be able to know what the equation actually means and what the terms actually refer to.

Heat Flow

The climate science greenhouse effect is a simulacrum.  It is not science, nor is everything that is based on it science.  All of climate alarm is a simulacrum, a fraud, and most of what could have been real climate science has been infected and ruined by it.  It uses the words of science to give itself the appearance of science, but it does not actually contain the essence of science, i.e. the method or wisdom or rationality of science.  See the last post for more detail on this.  What it is, is an attack on human existence.

Let’s cover some basics about calculating the temperature that heating from sunlight is able to generate on a surface absorbing solar energy.

The temperature T induced by sunlight on a cooler surface when in thermal equilibrium is given by

F = ε*σ*T4

where F is the absorbed (and then re-emitted when in equilibrium) flux.  The absorbed flux is the solar insolation, ‘I’, multiplied by the absorptivity, and absorptivity is 1 minus the albedo ‘α’.  So then

I*(1-α) = ε*σ*T4

and you can rearrange for T to get the temperature of the surface absorbing the insolation:

T = (I*(1-α)/ε/σ)1/4

This equation predicts surface temperatures exposed to sunlight very accurately, as shown in real greenhouses, black asphalt, beach sand, car interiors, spacecraft, etc.

Now, the equation

Q = A*σ*(Th4 – Tc4)

is for heat flow.  (‘A’ is the area here so that the units of heat are properly in Joules.)  Q is just the portion of the energy which is flowing as heat.  This is a different thing than what we just looked at.  Q is not the value of absorbed solar insolation, I*(1-a).  Q is not the solar insolation energy.  If it was, then you would have

I*(1-α) = A*σ*(Th4 – Tc4)

but that equation is nonsensical, because the terms don’t make sense given the preexisting context of solar insolation absorbed into a surface.  In the first place, the units on the left and right hand sides don’t even match!  And then, what is Th?

The UN IPCC and others with a vested interest in the global warming scare have not bothered to check what sea level evidence says about global temperature changes.Sea levels are very sensitive to temperature changes, and the oceanic indicators are currently reading “steady”. So are all other thermometers.

Apart from bubbles of heat surrounding big cities, the thermometers and satellites of the world have not shown a warming trend for 17 years. This is in spite of some inspired fiddling with the records by those whose jobs, research grants and reputations depend on their ability to generate alarming forecasts of destructive global warming.

To explain this absence of warming on Earth’s surface, the warmists now claim that “the missing heat is hiding in the deep oceans”. This sounds like a water-tight alibi, hard to disprove because of our inability to measure “average ocean temperature” directly. However, the ocean itself is a huge thermometer – all we have to do is to read the gauges. Most liquids expand when heated, and this property is used in traditional thermometers. They have a glass reservoir filled with liquid (usually mercury) and a graduated scale to measure any thermal expansion of that liquid.

Oceans have the essentials of a global thermometer – the huge ocean basins are the reservoir, sea water acts like the mercury, and tide gauges on the shore-line (or satellites) measure changes in sea water volume.Two factors, both dependent on global temperature, are the main causes of any general rise in sea levels – how much ice has melted from land-based ice sheets like Greenland and Antarctica; and the expansion of sea water volume as ocean temperature rises.

A leading world expert on arable pasture science has entered the global warming debate to cast serious doubt on UN claims that so-called ‘greenhouse gases’ from beef and general livestock production have any impact on climate change.

Dr. Albrecht Glatzle, a Fellow of the Tropical Grassland Society of Australia Inc., has this week sent an open letter to Dr. Henning Steinfeld, who heads the UN’s Livestock, Environment and Development (LEAD) iniatitive, challenging alarmist UN claims about “dangerous” emissions from such farms.

A Freedom of Information Act request in the UK filed by a doctor there has revealed 30 years of secret official documents showing that government experts have:

1. Known the vaccines don’t work
2. Known they cause the diseases they are supposed to prevent
3. Known they are a hazard to children
4. Colluded to lie to the public
5. Worked to prevent safety studies

Those are the same vaccines that are mandated to children in the US.

Educated parents can either get their children out of harm’s way or continue living inside one of the largest most evil lies in history, that vaccines – full of heavy metals, viral diseases, mycoplasma, fecal material, DNA fragments from other species, formaldehyde, polysorbate 80 (a sterilizing agent) – are a miracle of modern medicine.

Freedom of Information Act filed in the US with the CDC by a doctor with an autistic son, seeking information on what the CDC knows about the dangers of vaccines, had by law to be responded to in 20 days. Nearly 7 years later, the doctor went to court and the CDC argued it does not have to turn over documents. A judge ordered the CDC to turn over the documents on September 30th, 2011.