Dear Professor Raupach,

On Thursday 4th September we attended an event hosted by the Fenner School of Environmental Science which was held in conjunction with the ANU Climate Change Institute. The title of the event was “Climate Change- Why facts and Opinion are both important”.  

This letter is to inform you of our concern regarding what the MP3 recording http://fennerschool.anu.edu.au/news-events/event-recordings/climate-change-why-facts-and-opinions-are-both-important   evidences as an underlying political agenda directed against the Abbott Government.  Both the petition and invitation to join a protest march on the 21st September are clearly a political agenda and have no place in a science forum. 

As the recording evidences, the presentations by Professor Smithson, Ms Bruer and Dr Will Grant were littered with seemingly unfounded misrepresentations. The recording also evidences what appears to be an attempt to seize the high moral ground and use it to provoke antagonism against the Abbott Government amongst University and High School Students.  Let us remind you that the Abbott Government was overwhelmingly voted in and given a mandate to remove the carbon tax and all its dysfunctional hangers on.

Professor Raupach my question to you (1.06.33 on the recording)  quote“……when you talk about carbon pollution and carbon emissions you are, actually I think it was Will, referred to it as carbon dioxide, which is what the full word is. It is carbon-dioxide emissions.  Carbon dioxide has two states: its gaseous state and its solid state, which is dry ice. How can it be either a pollutant or a warming agent?”

To quote your response (1.07.23):- 

“It is not a pollutant any more than water is a pollutant…………”

A little known fact about trees is that 90 percent of the water they remove from the ground is released directly into the atmosphere as water vapour. Therefore the depletion of our forests impacts the hydrological cycle which, in turn, influences atmospheric temperature. 

FORESTS AIR CONDITION THE ENVIRONMENT

What are researchers discovering?

   “Trees can reduce air temperature by blocking sunlight. Further cooling occurs when water evaporates from the leaf surface. The conversion of water to air vapor — a chemical process — removes heat energy from the air.

• A tree can be a natural air conditioner. The evaporation from a single tree can produce the cooling effect of 10 room size air conditioners operating 20 hours a day.

http://www.ncsu.edu/project/treesofstrength/benefits.htm 

“New research concludes that evaporated water helps cool the earth as a whole, not just the local area of evaporation, demonstrating that evaporation of water from trees and lakes could have a cooling effect on the entire atmosphere.”http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110914161729.htm

REDUCED CLOUD COVER AND PRECIPITATION EQUALS WARMING

   Naturally keeping a forested area means more water vapour and more clouds can form and cool the region by reducing the incoming sunlight.

   Therefore if you reverse the process and remove the trees there is less water vapour, fewer clouds, more shortwave radiation from sunlight-warmed Earth.

   Add to this reduced water vapour causing reduced precipitation, rainfall is well known to cool the climate, and you have deforestation as a significant factor in global warming. Large scale deforestation has been reported to cause between 30 to 80 percent reduction in precipitation to the local area. The definition of a DROUGHT is   ”A prolonged period of abnormally low rainfall” so it is accurate to state that deforestation is a cause of drought. 

   “Deforestation results increase temperatures due to the reduction in the cooling effects of evapotranspiration caused by loss of vegetation (Snyder, 2010). This also contributes towards reduced cloud formation (Castillo & Gurney, 2012)”.

Intact tropical

      “Models by Snyder (2010) indicate that deforestation in all three major tropical forest centres would cause increased air temperatures within the forest regions of 2- 3°C. For example,

the Amazon region is predicted to warm by 1.88°C between September and November.”

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/Global/international/publications/forests/2013/JN455-An-Impending-Storm.pdf

• NASA put it like this:                           

	Climate Impacts: Rainfall and Temperature
	Up to thirty percent of the rain that falls in tropical forests is water that the rainforest has recycled into the atmosphere. Water evaporates from the soil and vegetation, condenses into clouds, and falls again as rain in a perpetual self-watering cycle. In addition to maintaining tropical rainfall, the evaporation cools the Earth’s surface. In many computer models of future climate, replacing tropical forests with a landscape of pasture and crops creates a drier, hotter climate in the tropics.

THE IPCC overlook the cooling effect of forests completely and put it like this:

IPCC AR5 findings with respect to tropical deforestation and land use change:

Net carbon emissions from land-use change during the past decade (mainly from deforestation) are estimated at 3.3 billion tonnes of CO2e[1] annually – around 10{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of all human emissions. Carbon emissions derived from land use change continue to be a major contributor to global warming only superseded by the burning of fossil fuels.

It goes on to say “Tropical forests are some of world’s richest and most valuable forms of natural capital and are being degraded on an unprecedented scale due to an increasing population and changing patterns of consumption. They pump water around the planet, remove CO2 from the atmosphere, support the wellbeing of hundreds of millions of people and underpin the economies of entire regions.”

  http://www.globalcanopy.org/updates/blogs/global-canopy-programmes-reaction-todays-ipcc-report

THE BIOTIC PUMP

   Here highlighted is a reference in their own report that the cooling system described is a type of “pump”. It is in fact known as the “BIOTIC PUMP” and disturbance of this pump has been shown to cause significant warming and climate change. The introduction to a paper detailing some of these changes states.

Abstract: Intense condensation associated with high evaporation from natural forest cover maintains regions of low atmospheric pressure on land. This causes moist air to flow from ocean to land, which compensates the river runoff. Deforestation induces large-scale desiccation by disrupting this flow. Here we overview this theory and quantify the horizontal pressure gradients that govern the continental moisture supply. High evaporation and large extent of natural forests guarantee both a stable and high throughput hydrological cycle. Forests protect a continent against devastating floods, droughts, hurricanes, and tornadoes. Sustaining natural forests is a sound strategy for water security and climate stabilisation.

http://www.bioticregulation.ru/common/pdf/ijw10.pdf

 STATISTICS ON WORLDWIDE DEFORESTATION

   “Deforestation Statistics Worldwide

The statistics of deforestation reveal that seven countries of the world amount to around 60 percent of the total deforestation on the planet. These seven countries include Brazil in Latin America, Canada and the United States in North America, Indonesia and China in Asia, Russia in Europe and the Democratic Republic of Congo in Africa.

The data compiled by the World Resources Institute reveals that the planet has already lost 80 percent of its forest cover to deforestation…”           Source: World Preservation Foundation.

   This figure of 80 percent includes all time loss due to the growth of civilisation. The estimate is of 1.9 billion hectares lost since the industrial revolution.  For a contemporary statistic we can look at deforestation annually.

   Taking the top 10 countries with highest deforestation and adding the tropical deforestation zones together totals 6,118,607 hectares lost annually. The boreal deforestation zones make up 747,400 hectares of this.

http://www.mapsofworld.com/world-top-ten/countries-with-highest-deforestation-map.html

It is argued that the boreal deforestation has a net cooling effect due to snow being able to settle where the tree once was and increase albedo. But also the removal of the trees reduces water vapour which reduces clouds and rainfall which causes warming. Plus there is a recorded decrease in CCN (Cloud condensation Nuclei) related to deforesting the Boreal regions. So un-decided.

 But if you subtract the boreal forest with its possible cooling from the tropical letting some cooling cancel out warming this results in a net warming from 5,371,207 hectares of deforestation per year that has been falsely attributed purely to CO2.

CLOUD RELATED CLIMATE CHANGE

   This is an extra 5.37 million hectares annually which will then have reduced cooling from evaporation, reduced cloud cover and reduced precipitation with its related warming. 

   A variation of 4-5 percent of cloud cover worldwide results in a 1 C change in temperature so any variations must be taken into account.

    It appears the IPCC is overlooking a significant driver of global warming and falsely attributing warming in deforested zones just to the unproven CO2 theory. Disturbance of the “Biotic Pump” appears to be the major player in the deforestation, warming, climate change equation not CO2.

Read also: 

Forests as rainmakers: CIFOR scientist gains support for a controversial hypothesis

Food allergies affect an estimated 15 million Americans, including one in 13 children. Statistics indicate something strange is afoot, as food allergies in children rose by 50 percent between 1997 and 2011 alone. 

Similarly, in Great Britain one in three people are allergic to something, be it pollen, dust mites, or food.1 Previous research has drawn parallels between the rise in allergies and increased antibiotic and antimicrobial use. One study2showed exposure to antibiotics early in life increased the risk of eczema in children by 40 percent.

Other research has shown how genetically engineered foods and the use of the agricultural herbicide glyphosate destroys gut bacteria, thereby promoting allergies.

According to one recent study3, 4 common gut bacteria called Clostridiaspecifically help prevent sensitization to food allergens. In short, by destroying gut bacteria and altering your microbiome, agricultural chemicals like glyphosate can play a significant role in creating food allergies.

Antibiotic Pesticides Can Cause Allergic Reactions

But glyphosate is not the only culprit. Part of what makes glyphosate so harmful is the fact that it has antibiotic action, and antibiotics are also part of other pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides.

Researchers now claim to have identified the first case in which a serious allergic reaction was traced to an antibiotic pesticide.5, 6 In this case, a 10-year old girl suffered a severe allergic reaction to blueberry pie.

The culprit turned out to be a streptomycin-containing pesticide that had been applied to the blueberries. According to lead author Dr. Anne Des Roches, this is “the first report that links an allergic reaction to fruits treated with antibiotic pesticides.”

Infrasound and other wind farm problems recognized by scientists.In an interview published in Truthout, Dr Patricia Mora casts doubts about the way in which environmental studies are conducted. 

“What happens is absolute corruption. I have to admit that generally there are “agreements” behind closed doors between the consultants or research centers and the government offices before the studies are conducted. They fill out forms with copied information (and sometimes badly copied), lies or half truths in order to divert attention from the real project while at the same time complying with requirements on paper. Unfortunately, consultants sometimes take advantage of high unemployment and hire inexperienced people or unemployed career professionals without proper titles. Sometimes the consultants even coerce them into modifying the data.

“Research centers, pressured by a lack of funding, accept these studies. It is well known that scientists recognized by CONACYT (National Counsel on Science and Technology) accept gifts from these companies, given that they need money to buy equipment for their laboratories and to fill their pocketbooks to maintain their lifestyles. This is the extent of the corruption. Upon reviewing these studies, it is clear that the findings are trash, sometimes even directly copied from other sources online. These studies tend to focus on the “benefits of the project” and do not include rigorous analysis.

<satire> Dear Uncle Siemens,

I am hearing a lot about you in the news lately. Somehow your offshore wind turbines in the German Bight can’t deliver any power.  ABB’s HVDC converter station seems to have a fever and the prognosis is not good. Some unkind folks claim that you could catch a cold because of that. Really?  I mean what’s €500 million between friends? Especially if you can charge it to the electricity consumer! 

Your plans for the Libya-sized solar panels in the Sahara desert also seem to be on hold. Well, after the fiasco in Mexico where they got sand-blasted into oblivion in short order, that’s not entirely surprising. I think you need to spend a few Euros to re-educate the public on the benefits of your technologies. As the old adage (attributed to Winston Churchill) goes: never let a good crisis go to waste!

Believe me, green (like in the dollar bill green) power is the way to go!

Green Power

In any event, the deniers of green and free solar and wind power are just envious of your successes. Who cares that electricity prices in Europe are sky-rocketing and big energy-sucking industry is leaving for greener, pardon me, I mean cheaper places. They should have known that we need to “de-energize” to the level of our ancestors, the Neanderthals. Isn’t that why the government is shutting down the nuclear power plants in Germany? Isn’t that why coal has become “dirty” there as well?

It’s all so obvious; have you ever seen a coal miner coming back from his shift without being black from head to toe? How disgusting; can’t they go about their business in well-ironed suits, ties and with CLEAN HANDS and FACES?
Back to the wind power turbines though (I really hate the people who call them bird shredders): Isn’t it about time the Europeans are “getting up to speed” as well? After all, why should there be 10,000-plus defunct turbines in the U.S. and none anywhere else? This is progress and it’s simply unstoppable.

In Carbon, Leonardo DiCaprio’s new film about the “climate crisis,” we are told the world is threatened by a “carbon monster.” Coal, oil, natural gas and other carbon-based forms of energy are causing dangerous climate change and must be turned off as soon as possible, DiCaprio insists. 

But he has identified the wrong monster. The real one is the climate scare – something DiCaprio promotes with his sensationalist, error-riddled movie. That is the real threat to civilization.

Carbon is the first of four films that DiCaprio planned to release in the weeks prior to the United Nations’Climate Summit 2014, to be held in New York City September 23. If Carbon is any indication of what the rest of the series will be like, the public needs to brace itself against still more mind-numbing global warming propaganda.

DiCaprio repeatedly uses the “carbon pollution” and “carbon poison” misnomers – when he’s really talking about carbon dioxide (CO₂), the plant-fertilizing gas that is essential for all life on Earth. But in addition to that deception, DiCaprio’s film is based on a myth: that CO₂ from human activities is causing catastrophic climate change.

The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) lists thousands of scientific papers that either debunk or cast serious doubt on this popular though misguided notion.

Oregon-based physicist Dr. Gordon Fulks explains that the climate scare has “become a sort of societal pathogen that virulently spreads misinformation in tiny packages like a virus. CO₂ is said to be responsible for global warming that is not occurring, for accelerated sea level rise that is not occurring, for net glacial and sea ice melt that is not occurring, for ocean acidification that is not occurring, and for increasing extreme weather that is not occurring.”

New technology developed by scientists in China could lead to a super-fast submarine that can travel more than 3,000 miles per hour.

Scientists from China may have found a way to travel from Shanghai to San Francisco in less than two hours. Researchers from the Harbin Institute of Technology say that their method can exceed the speed of sound underwater at 3,600 miles per hour. The technology would be used in submarines and torpedoes. 

The idea was inspired by a Soviet concept called supercavitation. This means creating large air bubbles around individual objects to avoid facing friction, allowing objects to travel through water much faster.

When the submarine hits water, a mechanism continuously sprays what Professor Li Fengchen refers to as a “special liquid membrane” all over its surface. The liquid eventually washes off, but when the sub reaches 46 miles per hour, it is already going fast enough to enter a supercavitation state in which it generates an air bubble that helps it cover long distances.

Scientists say the extent of Antarctic sea ice cover is at its highest level since records began. Satellite imagery reveals an area of about 20 million square kilometres covered by sea ice around the Antarctic continent.

Jan Lieser from the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) said the discovery was made two days ago.

“This is an area covered by sea ice which we’ve never seen from space before,” he said.

“Thirty-five years ago the first satellites went up which were reliably telling us what area, two dimensional area, of sea ice was covered and we’ve never seen that before, that much area.

“That is roughly double the size of the Antarctic continent and about three times the size of Australia.”

The formation of sea ice around Antarctica every year is one of the biggest seasonal events on Earth.

The ice is generated in what scientists refer to as “sea ice factories” or polynia  – areas of the ocean surface where currents and wind patterns combine to generate sea ice.

“As soon as sea ice is produced in these polynias it is actually transported away from that so more sea ice can be produced,” Dr Lieser said.

Recent observations of the effects of a massive solar storm on the Earth’s atmosphere made by NASA using the SABER instrument on the TIMED satellite have very important implications for the two main classes of hypotheses backing the idea of catastrophic man-made global warming. 

During this solar storm, gigantic quantities of energy were dumped into the Earth’s upper atmosphere by highly energetic particles.  The SABER instrument measures the infrared emissions from the Earth’s upper atmosphere.  The NASA measurements of those infrared emissions during the solar storm showed that 95{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the energy dumped into upper atmosphere was quickly re-emitted into space.  There was no significant warming of the Earth’s surface.

The significance with respect to the various man-made global warming hypotheses of this observation has often not been well-explained by critics of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (AGW).  The fact that the energy arrives in the atmosphere as energetic particles has often been glossed over in such commentaries, yet this is very important. 

The energy of the solar storm is not of the same nature as the mix of ultraviolet (UV), visible light, and near and mid infrared radiation which provides the Earth with heat energy on a daily basis.  Though this important difference exists, the results of the solar storm energy measurements by NASA are still crucially significant for one of the principal global warming hypotheses and somewhat significant for the other main AGW hypothesis.

There are two standard hypotheses for the global warming mechanism that CO₂ is supposed to provide at a catastrophic level:

1)  A large back-radiation effect near the Earth surface caused by water vapor and CO₂, which warms the surface.

2)  A delay or decrease in radiation in the upper troposphere or stratosphere caused by increased CO₂ and NO.

As I have discussed many times on my blog, most recently in Simple Explanation of Why Greenhouse Gases Do Not Warm the Earth’s Surface, back-radiation at the Earth’s surface is insignificant because the mean free path for the infrared radiation absorptions of water vapor and carbon dioxide are very short and the corresponding temperature differences between the surface and the lower few meters of the atmosphere are therefore very small. 

The smaller than claimed infrared radiation from the surface is very quickly absorbed and distributed to nitrogen, oxygen, and argon in the air due to the very high collision rate in the lower atmosphere.  These primary air molecules do not radiate this energy and it is then mostly transported by convection upward or toward the poles.  Water vapor and CO₂ actually slightly increase the rate of energy transport upward following the downward temperature and density gradients. 

Thus Hypothesis 1 fails to make physical sense.  As more and more proponents of catastrophic AGW have realized this failure, they have turned to the second hypothesis as the justification for AGW.

The first large scale wind-power installation, some 100 km (65 miles) offshore the northwest coast of Germany has finally been connected to the grid. The Offshore-Windpark Deutsche Bucht is a wind farm with a total of 80 wind turbine towers, each with a hub height of 100 m (300 ft.) above the sea and a combined design output of some 400 Megawatts in electric power.

Connection to the Grid

Because of delays in getting the underwater cabling and connection to the power grid on land, the whole power park was standing idle for the last two years. In order to prevent potential damage to gear boxes and turbines, each tower was supplied with energy from small gasoline-powered electricity generators for that time. 

Several years behind schedule, the Bard 1 wind farm finally came altogether in March 2014. The wind farm was connected to the electric grid and started to deliver energy. Alas, it did not last very long.  In March, the separate AC-to-DC converter station at the facility suffered a “meltdown.” A new converter installed a few days ago was shut down not much later without explanation.

HVDC Converters

The alternating current (AC) coming from the turbines cannot be directly transmitted to the grid. Instead, it needs to be converted to high voltage direct current (HVDC) first. In principle, that is a straight forward task and has been solved for a long time. All the high-tension electric power transmission lines around the world use such HVDC converters. So what’s the problem with the wind farm converter?

Pick up a research paper on battery technology, fuel cells, energy storage technologies or any of the advanced materials science used in these fields, and you will likely find somewhere in the introductory paragraphs a throwaway line about its application to the storage of renewable energy.  Energy storage makes sense for enabling a transition away from fossil fuels to more intermittent sources like wind and solar, and the storage problem presents a meaningful challenge for chemists and materials scientists… Or does it?

Eighteen years (less one month) and counting; that’s the time since the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted “global warming” of the earth’s climate but, given the length of the current cooling cycle,  the “warmists” are now calling it a “warming pause.” 

 

Electric sparks might have helped break down lunar dirt, suggesting the moon may be significantly more active than previously thought, a new study finds. 

This kind of sparking might take place throughout the solar system, from Mercury to the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn, researchers added.

The giant craters that pockmark the face of the moon bear witness to a violent past full of cosmic impacts. Meteorites continue to bombard the moon, breaking down or “weathering” its soil. Indeed, the moon is much harder hit than Earth, whose thick atmosphere protects the planet from many incoming space rocks. [The Greatest Moon Crashes of All Time]

The moon is also constantly hit by high-energy electrically charged particles. For instance, electrons and protons often burst from the sun, and more energetic particles known as cosmic rays also regularly strike from elsewhere in the Milky Way galaxy.

Previous studies only investigated how these high-energy particles electrically charge the uppermost layer of the lunar surface. Lead study author Andrew Jordan, a space physicist at the University of New Hampshire, and his colleagues explored whether high-energy electrically charged particles might also penetrate deeper into the moon.

Lunar soil is an electrical insulator, meaning it has extremely low conductivity. Any electrically charged particles that do penetrate deep into it can thus get trapped inside and accumulate.

For decades, scientists have known this phenomenon, known as deep dielectric charging, can occur in spacecraft. If too much charge accumulates, the resulting electrical sparks can damage electronics.

The researchers focused on craters near the lunar poles that host permanently shadowed regions. These dark areas can reach temperatures as low as minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 240 degrees Celsius). The colder lunar soil gets, the more electrically insulating it becomes.

Approximately every 11 years, the sun undergoes a complete personality change from quiet and calm to violently active. The height of the sun’s activity, known as solar maximum, is a time of numerous sunspots, punctuated with profound eruptions that send radiation and solar particles out into the far reaches of space. 

The Sun had a flurry of flare activity at the end of August, releasing over half a dozen solar flares in a day, some of which were accompanied by coronal mass ejections. 

NEW YORK – As the United Nations prepares for its 2014 Climate Summit in New York this month with an agenda to advance a new carbon-emissions regulatory agreement to supersede the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the Russian scientist who correctly predicted the lack of global warming over the past 19 years has gained new scientific support for his belief that Earth is in the beginning of a prolonged ice age.