2,000+ years old and counting, the giant redwood trees (Sequoiadendron giganteum) in California are having a great time – they are growing faster than ever before. A new study by UC Berkeley and Humboldt State University researchers finds them in a growth spurt that began about 100 years ago and began to accelerate in recent decades. 

California’s redwood trees are among the oldest living organisms on earth. Some are over 3,000 years old and still going strong. So what’s the cause of their recent growth spurt?

Tree Food

Apart from a beneficial climate, trees grow when they have an adequate supply of three vital nutrients: (i) water, (ii) soil minerals and – you may be surprised to learn – (iii) carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. Without plenty of each of these any tree will wilt or die.

With sufficient supplies of the first two key ingredients, depending on its location on earth, any kind of tree will grow at a rate determined by its ability to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and convert the sun’s radiation via the photosynthesis process to wood. The higher the level of CO2 in the air, the faster it will grow.

Carbon Dioxide

The dependence of tree growth on CO2 is well known to commercial enterprises growing tree saplings for reforestation in old mine shafts and similar facilities. The operators typically boost the CO2-level in the air from the current 400 ppm (parts per million) to 1,000 ppm and above. That’s still only half the CO2 concentration commonly found in submarines.

There is plenty of scientific evidence that such an increase in atmospheric CO2 increases the rate of growth of tree saplings; P. Driessen recently called it the “gas of life.” Why should it be any different for old-growth California redwoods?

Wikipedia shows that the curious term used by Mike Hulme, who argues Global Warming can only be met by something called “post-normal” science has a history of use in the environmental movement since the late 1980s and early 90s. I have interspersed the Wikipedia entry describing the term with my own commentary.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) never followed the scientific method. They inferred the hypothesis that an increase in atmospheric CO2 due to human activities would inevitably cause a rise in global temperature. They set out to prove this when they should have tried to disprove it in what Popper calls “falsification.” Over at least the last 15 years global temperature has leveled and declined while CO2 levels continue to increase. What is actually happening is in contradiction to their hypothesis and essentially impossible according to the conclusion in their 2007 Report.

Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations. It is likely that there has been significant anthropogenic warming over the past 50 years averaged over each continent (except Antarctica).

Despite this on 16 Aug Reuters news agency reported:

“Drafts seen by Reuters of the study by the U.N. panel of experts, due to be published next month, say it is at least 95 percent likely that human activities – chiefly the burning of fossil fuels – are the main cause of warming since the 1950s.”

They’re talking about a change in the next Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or Assessment Report 5. (AR5). It is significant because it is an increase from the 2007 Fourth Report (FAR) when they were >90 {154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} certain.

If accurate, this claim is made in the face of evidence that their hypothesis is wrong. Perhaps it is explained by the recent comment by a leading member of the IPCC. He effectively said, failed proof of the hypothesis doesn’t matter because,

“Proof is for mathematical theorems and alcoholic beverages. It’s not for science.”

So-called “renewable energy” is not clean, renewable, reliable, affordable or sustainable.

“Renewable energy” is a sexy term used to drive public policies and spending. Misguided governments and like-minded Greens have said repeatedly that they are waging a “war on coal,” intend to bankrupt coal-based power plants, and delay or block oil, natural gas and nuclear projects – while fast-tracking and subsidizing ethanol, wind and solar programs. These are the so-called “clean” energy choices but are no such thing.

Nonetheless, many are swayed by the hype. They insist compelling and subsidizing increased renewable energy use, while undermining and even outlawing conventional energy, is the way to economic growth and energy independence. But critics argue this is a reckless scheme that could easily cause the collapse of our energy grid, job creation, economy and living standards, just as it is already doing in Europe.

Too often the term “renewable” confers an almost Holy Grail status that ensures widespread political, media, public and corporate support (for a lot of wrong reasons). That lofty status, however, ignores two fundamental facts:

1) Wind, solar and biofuel energy are not renewable, eco-friendly, reliable, affordable or sustainable.

2) Renewable energy schemes can no longer be justified by claims that we are rapidly running out of ‘fossil fuels’ or causing dangerous man-made global warming. Oil sands and hydraulic fracturing have obliterated the depletion myth, while climate change fears are belied by a 16-year hiatus from planetary warming, historic lows in hurricane and tornado activity, and the abject failure of CO2-focused climate computer models.

In other words, the craze for “renewables” may be shown to be driven by religious zeal, not science or economics.

A new process, called “Electrochemically Mediated Seawater Desalination” has recently been described. The inventors claim that it could potentially lead to large-scale 99{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} desalination of seawater at low cost. Some people have dubbed the invention the “water chip.”

The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) is listed as a “partner” on the company’s website. Fig. The prototype plastic “water chip” contains a micro-channel that branches in two, and utilizes a process known as electrochemically mediated seawater desalination. Image source: Okeanos Technologies.

Laboratory vs. Nature

What may work well with trace quantities of high-purity materials in the laboratory does not necessarily work in the real environment. Most water, especially ocean water contains a multitude of constituents, from dissolved (mostly inorganic) salts to a large variety of organic compounds. Even quite pristine freshwater, like that of the Laurentian upper Great Lakes develops visible foams of natural compounds around its perimeter upon wave action due to the presence of natural surfactants.

Ocean water is full of such natural surfactants and a host of other “chemicals.” Therefore, any desalination process has to deal not only with the salt content but also with the other natural constituents of ocean water. That is why a simple, large scale desalination method has been a long sought after quest.

A major reason the science isn’t settled is because the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) never practiced science. They didn’t even look at climate change, only the possible human causes of climate change. Now they are victims of what T. H. Huxley identified over 100 years ago, The great tragedy of science – the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact. Most often the “ugly fact” is that the predictions derived from the hypothesis are wrong.

What do people do? Tolstoi, again over 100 years ago, identified one reaction:

“I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”

But this doesn’t explain what actions such people should or might take. Often it is a human weakness reaction explained by Upton Sinclair’s observation that, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” It may also fit Greek philosopher Epictetus’ view that It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”

Science has specific rules. It requires you determine the error in the work and either make adjustments or accept the null hypothesis. This does not mean you are wrong, it just means that the opposite to what you hypothesized is occurring.

My analysis of the radiation question is that there is an extremely preposterous contradiction in the Trenberth model (1998), sometimes called the Kiehl-Trenberth energy budget (see below).  The IPCC uses this model. It’s explained in the FAQ section of the IPCC 4th AR, but I haven’t seen it in the main section.  I miss a lot in that endless garbage.  

I show the numbers on this web page:  http://nov79.com/gbwm/grn.html

The Trenberth model includes both the invisible (non net) radiation and net radiation, as assumed to be true of black box situations.  The ridiculousness of it is that the Stefan-Boltzmann constant (SBC) requires so much radiation that it left very little energy for conduction.  Radiation from the earth’s surface at the claimed average temperature of 15°C must be 390 W/m², according to the SBC.  This left only 24 W/m² for conduction from the earth’s surface.  The ratio is 6{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} as much conduction as radiation.  Industrial or domestic cooling fans would never be used if they only provided 6{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} improvement over radiation.  I would expect such a ratio with white hot metals, not 15°C. The SBC leaves no other choice for numbers, when modeling as in the Trenberth energy budget.  They had little choice but to show 324 W/m² of invisible radiation from atmosphere to surface, because it had to be less than 350 W/m² going from surface to atmosphere, but not much less, because it takes away from the amount which can be attributed to conduction. So they left their analysis with a ridiculous amount of conduction and never resolved the contradiction with obvious logic.

Man-made global warming “skeptics” Dr. Roy Spencer and Anthony Watts (he of the science blog, WUWT) are both very much on the defensive this week. Each has been exposed as zealous defenders of flat earth physics (literally!).

“Flat earther” is a term of ridicule often used against backwards thinkers. But in this case Spencer and Watts, prominent spokesmen for the skeptic cause, are persisting in regarding earth as flat. They do so in the forlorn hope no one will notice it is the botch of modeling earth as flat that makes the equations for the discredited greenhouse gas effect “work.” Both men are being called out for their anti-intellectualism by Principia Scientific International’s Joe Postma in his The Fraud of the AGHE Part 14: Controlled Opposition.

Postma, a successful astrophysicist by profession, again shows that you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see that the greenhouse gas effect (GHE), the cornerstone of climate alarmism is bogus.

Mainstream science had long known the GHE was junk. Who says so? None other than the renowned American Meteorological Society. [1] The AMS stated that the idea that CO2 could alter the climate “was never widely accepted and was abandoned when it was found that all the long-wave radiation absorbed by CO2 is absorbed by water vapor.”

The Great Switcharoo came about when governments chose to encourage science ruled by opinion rather than fact. Thanks to no documented game changing discoveries, no great scientific breakthroughs no Nobel science prizes, post-normalism permitted us to disregard the unequivocal empirical fact that carbon dioxide is shown only to operate as a cooling gas. 

Analogies are a valuable teaching device converting everything from ideas to objects into supposedly more recognizable forms. They includes biblical parables, Aesop’s Fables, hardware models, toys, computer models and even mathematical formulae. However, something is always lost in translation. How many school science projects fail to miniaturize the flow characteristics of ice?

The greenhouse/atmosphere analogy is much more problematic because most parts don’t work in the same way. Its value was political because people associate a greenhouse, or hothouse, with increased heat. But that’s appropriate because the hypothesis and attempts at proof that human CO2 was causing warming are political.

Another deceptive value is that few know how a greenhouse works and even fewer the atmosphere. Indeed, nobody knows how the atmosphere works. If they did, weather and climate forecasts would work.

The basic idea of a greenhouse is that sunlight or shortwave (SW) energy passes through the glass and heats surfaces. The surfaces radiate that heat as longwave (LW) energy or sensible heat (heat you can feel). LW cannot pass through the glass, so is trapped and raises the temperature in the greenhouse; the glass acts like a one-way valve. A greenhouse is a closed system because the heat cannot escape unless artificially changed by opening vents or blocking sunlight. The glass supposedly represents the entire atmosphere. It also blocks 100 percent of the ultraviolet (UV) portion of the sunlight.

The atmosphere is an open system, with heat energy always escaping to space. Unlike the glass it absorbs 95{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the UV in the creation of ozone. This sounds insignificant, but one scientist argues variation in the 5 percent is the cause of warming.

CFCs are already known to deplete ozone, but in-depth statistical analysis now shows that CFCs are also the key driver in global climate change, rather than carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

In the greenhouse and in the atmosphere energy is partly transferred from the heated surfaces through collision between air molecules (conduction). However, in the atmosphere a large portion of that heat is transported vertically by rising air currents (convection), and also horizontally by advection or commonly wind. There are no winds in a greenhouse.

A major part of the energy striking the Earth’s surface causes evaporation. It increases water molecule speed so they escape the surface changing from liquid (water) to gas (water vapor). Heat is not lost (latent) but transported with the air and released when condensation occurs. This released heat warms the atmosphere, explaining why temperatures rise when it rains. This does not occur in a greenhouse.

The greenhouse glass blocks all LW and supposedly represents three atmospheric gases, water vapour, carbon dioxide and methane, known as greenhouse gases (GHG). They do not block all sensible heat and only temporarily delay escape to space. There are no analogous greenhouse components for the other gases or atmospheric factors. For example, dust particles significantly reduce SW and LW in the atmosphere.

GHGs don’t raise temperature like glass in a greenhouse. They modify atmospheric temperatures by reducing highs and increasing lows. In all weather and climate considerations water modifies temperature. Desert day – night temperature range is the highest anywhere due to lack of water vapour; not CO2. Commercial greenhouse operators raise CO2 levels to 1200 ppm, three times atmospheric levels. It doesn’t raise the temperature, but increases crop yields four times.

Heat reduction in a greenhouse requires a physical change with a vent to let LW escape or a screen to block SW entering. Clouds are nature’s screen. However, they can block SW and LW, such that we have little idea how clouds work to modify temperatures. As the National Science Foundation says, clouds are the wild card of climate change. In the 2001 IPCC Report it says,

“In response to any climate perturbation the response of cloudiness thereby introduces feedbacks whose sign and amplitude are largely unknown.”

It is like putting shades in a greenhouse and not knowing what they are going to do. So we have a model of the atmosphere that doesn’t know how clouds work but is the sole basis for climate predictions of global warming.

The Earth’s atmosphere is not like a greenhouse. It is a completely inappropriate analogy sadly equalled only by the false claim that climate models are an analogy of global climate.

– See more at: http://drtimball.com

 

Apollo 7 astronaut, Walter Cunningham mounts a scathing attack on junk climate science dismissing it as politicized alarmism unsupported by facts. In an interview with Larry Bell (Forbes; August 6, 2013), Cunningham says man-made global warming fears have been built on “phony conclusions.”

Pulling no punches Cunningham, referring to the open letter sent last year to NASA Administrator, Charles Bolden Jr., signed by dozens of former NASA staff and retired astronauts, called NASA’s former chief climatologist, James Hansen, “an embarrassment and disgrace to the agency.“

Since 1988 and up to his retirement earlier this year, Hansen was the figure in promoting the ‘greenhouse gas’ hypothesis as ‘scientific fact and formulated the botched equation to ‘prove’ it added an essential 33 degrees of ‘missing heat’ to earth’s climate. The claim has since been refuted by independent scientists at Principia Scientific International (PSI).

Cunningham goes on to assert:

NASA should be at the forefront in the collection of scientific evidence and debunking the current hysteria over human-caused [anthropogenic] global warming [AGW]. Unfortunately, it is becoming just another agency caught up in the politics of global warming, or worse, politicized science. Advocacy and support for the White House agenda is replacing objective evaluation of data, while scientific data is being ignored in favor of emotions and politics.

The conflict over AGW has deteriorated into a religious war; a war between true believers in a human-caused global warming problem and nonbelievers; between those who accept AGW on faith, and those who consider themselves more sensible and better informed. “True believers” are beyond being interested in evidence; it is impossible to reason a person out of positions they have not been reasoned into.

Much of this may be due to today’s lowered educational standards in scientific literacy, skepticism and critical thinking. Many people today are unable to distinguish between science and non-science, leaving them vulnerable to the emotional appeal of human caused global warming. Unfortunately, most students today are fed a lot more hype about self-esteem and global warming than real information about history and science. Let’s finally recognize that “self-esteem” is no substitute for common sense, and “indoctrination” is no substitute for education.

With the right leadership, with the right science, and with the right commitment to excellence and integrity, we will go much farther. And, it’s high time to do so.

Read Larry Bell’s full interview with Walter Cunningham here.

 

The claim that petroleum originates with biological materials seems strange, because biomass does not accumulate in such large quantities without decaying. The real proof that petroleum is not biological in its origins is in the chemistry. Petroleum is called hydrocarbon because of hydrogen attached to carbon. Hydrogen-carbon bonds are very high in energy.

Biological material has oxygen with it, called carbohydrate, which has less chemical energy. There is no way to increase chemical energy other than radiation. (ATP and similar reactions do not increase energy; they transfers energy with some loss). Heat and pressure will not increase chemical energy, because they act upon nuclei, while chemical energy is in electrons which spin around nuclei.

There is nothing that can be done to nuclei which will increase the motion of electrons which spin around them short of a nuclear reaction. (All chemical reactions go down-hill energetically with some energy loss as heat. There is not a one which does not lose energy apart from photochemical reactions). It means so-called fossil fuels did not originate with biological materials, because they were not exposed to light in a way which would increase the chemical energy from carbohydrates to hydrocarbons.

As is now generally known, there has been no warming of the Earth’s surface since 1998 at least.  Prior to that time, we were informed that there had been a rapid warming of the Earth’s surface and that it was caused by increasing carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations in the atmosphere due to man using fossil fuels. 

The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 4th Report still insisted that for 25 years the Earth had been warming.  A newly published study using satellite temperature sensing specifically for detecting the Earth’s surface temperature and minimizing that of the atmosphere above the surface, shows that the Earth’s surface, contrary to reports, actually cooled from 1982 to 2006!

The paper is entitled Meteosat Derived Planetary Temperature Trend 1982-2006 by Andries Rosema, Steven Foppes, and Joost van der Woerd and was published in Energy & Environment, Vol. 24, No. 3 & 4 2013.  They were very surprised to find the cooling trend they reported. Earlier satellite data analyses, originated by investigators at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, used microwave sensors to infer the temperature from microwave emissions from oxygen molecules. 

Microwaves of different energies originated from various layers of the atmosphere.  One set of data originated from an altitude of about 17 km.  Another at an altitude of about 3 – 4 km. Then by looking at data taken at oblique angles of incidence, they inferred a temperature from an altitude of about 0.8 km.  However, none of this data actually measures the Earth’s surface temperature.  Initially, this data on the lower atmosphere had shown a small cooling effect, but after many corrections were applied, the data yielded an increase of temperature of about 0.1 C/decade in the troposphere.  The troposphere is the bottom about 10 to 11 km of the atmosphere and its temperature is not at all necessarily in direct proportion to the surface temperature.  Indeed, increased cloud cover, water vapor, and CO2 in the atmosphere may cause an increase in the troposphere temperature even as it cools the surface temperature.

Science is not what it used to be. This concern is the starting point of Principia Scientific, where the focus is on correcting global warming science. Due to the vastness of climatology, it’s impossible to criticize the science without getting buried in a quagmire of endless details which displace relevance and perspective.

Books on global warming cannot sustain relevance and perspective, because they get immersed in too much one-sided detail. Flaws get carried too far, and corrections and responses are not possible. Another problem in this area is that there tends to be an absence of basics throughout global warming “science” and its criticism. When the basics are wrong, the problem is going to persist, even when the rest of the subject is corrected. The basics are the starting points which create the foundation for the rest of a subject.

One of the most basic errors in global warming “science” is a fudge factor for determining how much heat carbon dioxide produces in the atmosphere. If that fudge factor is correct, then carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and what it does is unquestionable. It’s all wrapped up in the fudge factor. The fudge factor has to be wrong before there can be anything wrong about the concept of global warming or how much heat will be produced by CO2 (before other “forcings”).

Yet the fudge factor is nowhere to be seen in criticism of global warming (or its promotion). It first showed up in a publication by James Hansen et al in 1988. Its origins cannot be determined. Norm Kalmanovitch took a look at it and said it appears to be an extension of past assumptions into the future. Supposedly, a temperature increase of 0.6°C occurred in the past with an increase of 100 parts per million CO2. So the fudge factor says increases in CO2 will always hold those proportions.

It won’t happen, and it is not happening with a recent cool-down, because temperatures constantly change for any number of reasons which have nothing to do with carbon dioxide. The fudge factor is fed into models, with the only question being how much secondary effect will be created by other factors (called forcing) such as increased water vapor causing more warming, since water vapor is a so-called greenhouse gas even stronger than CO2.

Have you ever wondered how, despite evidence to the contrary, so many scientists could believe humans were catastrophically altering our climate? It becomes even more of a wonder when you learn that any supposed climate catastrophe is based on junk science.

The junk science component of climatology relies on an untested and spurious hypothesis: “downwelling” or “back” radiation heating. This unproven mechanism as the linchpin of the so-called “greenhouse gas theory.” Grandfather of the hypothesis of the greenhouse gas effect (GHE), Svante Arrhenius (pictured), was discredited for claiming the existence of another such  “magic gas” (the “luminiferous eather“). It may have taken longer, but today it is the GHE itself, the second “magic gas”  myth promoted by Arrhenius, that now bites the dirt.

 

“Back Radiation heating:” A Post-normal Paradigm

So-called “downwelling” or “back” radiation heating is a climatic chimera conjured up by government-funded researchers who made themselves a post-normal breed apart from those in the “hard” sciences. Climatologists want you to believe in their “magic gas.” But their notion of back radiation heating is an alien concept to those trained in tougher disciplines such as Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Medicine, etc. Frankly, for more than a generation third rate researchers have been peddling a computer-generated fiction, a slant on radiative physics that relies heavily on discredited 19th century notions of a “magic gas” and little, if anything, on actual measurements and verifiable scientific techniques.

In an extract below from his latest article, Dr. E. Calvin Beisner shows that people right at the top of the pecking order of alarmist climate-change “scientists” know exactly what they’re doing—post-normal science, not real science.

Consider self-professed socialist Mike Hulme, founding director of the Tyndall Centre and Professor of Climate Change (note that title—not of climate, but of climate change) at the University of East Anglia, home of the Climatic Research Unit, of Climategate infamy. (Climategate was the release of thousands of emails, computer codes, and other documents among leading climate alarmist scientists that revealed that they were fabricating, exaggerating, cherry picking, and suppressing data, intimidating dissenting scientists, blackballing journal editors willing to publish the dissenters, corrupting the peer review process, refusing to share data and code with fellow scientists on request even when required to by the journals in which they published, and violating American and British Freedom of Information Acts.

For a mere $70,000 per couple, you can break ice at the North Pole. Actually, you can just sit back, sip a drink, and watch the nuclear-powered Russian icebreaker Victory do the work for you.

Arctic Cruises

There are plenty of Arctic cruises at this time of the year, between mid-June and mid-September. For example, the ad for the Victory’s “North Pole Expedition Cruise” reads:

Day 3-7 – Northbound in the Arctic Ocean
Watching the Victory crush through the Arctic ice pack is a sight you’ll never forget, made even more memorable by taking a helicopter flight for a thrilling aerial view of the Victory and expansive Arctic Ocean.

Elsewhere, it says:

“Carrying the highest ice class rating possible, Victory can crush ice up to 3 meters (10 feet) thick, and is the world’s largest and most sophisticated nuclear-powered icebreaker.”

Of course, the Victory is not the only ship plying the Arctic waters though most others are limited to zones of much thinner ice or ice-free water. According to another ad, you can even go “Hot Air Ballooning at the North Pole.”

In addition to sight-seeing expeditions, there are merchant ships attempting to use the Northwest Passage as a short route between the northern Atlantic and Pacific coasts, various naval and scientific research vessels, and companies exploring for natural resources.

Ice-Breaking

The increased marine activity in the Arctic is often accompanied by ice-breaking of some sort. Most of the ships operating there have re-enforced bows which lets them cut through a layer of ice. In part, the thrill of these “expeditions” derives from the sound of ice being crushed by the ship’s hull. It provides both audible and visible proof of man’s ingenuity and physical force in one of the world’s last frontiers.