There is growing evidence that birds flying in the vicinity of a solar thermal power project in California’s Mojave Desert are being injured and even killed either by the solar heat that’s focused with mirrors on its three energy-collecting towers, or by colliding with the mirrors themselves. 

Yet a task force set up to investigate the problem at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS) has brushed aside several recommendations by the forensics laboratory of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), according to the minutes of a meeting on the subject obtained by the Los Angeles public television station KCET.

The FWS had said wildlife mortality and injury at ISEGS may have been underrepresented because of inadequate searches for injured and dead animals, and it suggested ways to make those searches more thorough.

The panel – the Avian & Bat Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) – met in Nipton, Calif., on May 20, where it dismissed several FWS recommendations.

ISEGS is a solar thermal power generator that uses arrays of mirrors, called heliostats, that reflect and narrowly focus solar heat to “power towers” filled with water. The focused solar heat reaches a temperature of 800 degrees Fahrenheit, boiling the towers’ water to generate electricity.

Dead and injured birds have been found at the plant site, having been burned, evidently by the reflected solar heat, or with other injuries because they evidently failed to recognize the mirrored heliostats as solid surfaces, much the same way that birds crash into windows.

Lord Christopher Monckton’s article on WUWT claims “100 percent” of skeptics at latest Heartland’s Climate Conference believe in greenhouse gas warming. But many WUWT readers condemn lordship’s spin.  

Upperclass Brit Monckton became a comical figure in Las Vegas on July 7, 2014 when his plum tones repeated the mantra of carbon dioxide climate forcing, a key element of the supposed human-enhanced greenhouse gas effect.

Like others in the “lukewarmist” club his lordship feels the need to circle the wagons insisting CO2 “must” cause some warming – how much? He didn’t say.

But Monckton’s mission was to rally the troops and he wasn’t leaving that Vegas stage till he got his “proof” his audience backed him. But then this was always going to be little more than a drum-banging exercise. In fact. no scientists at the conference even paid lip service to the glaring elephant in the room: why rising human emissions of carbon dioxide are not warming our planet – not even in the slightest. In fact, global cooling has been happening this century.

The harsh black and white backdrop to this is the extraordinary absence of any additional global warming for more than 17 years, despite Monckton’s supposed scientific consensus saying that levels of atmospheric CO2 are up about 40 percent. Thus, more CO2 in the atmosphere doesn’t lead to more heat. As such, the “laboratory” of earth’s atmosphere is telling us the theory looks busted.

Instead of facing facts our faux aristocrat emulated the discredited and now infamous alarmist paper by John Cooke et al. (it “proved” the 97 percent scientific consensus on humans dangerously warming the planet) submitting his own dubious six-question survey for conference attendees to complete. Polling duly completed his article claims all 600 of the assembled skeptics were on message. But plenty of savvy readers on WUWT weren’t buying any of it and nor was Andre Lofthus who last week in American Thinker wrote:

“Real scientists would demand to know the physics of how increased CO2 in the atmosphere causes global warming.  Is there any real physics behind this unsupported bold assertion?” But then most people aren’t aware that Monckton was never a government science adviser nor a scientist either.

Australia is a great place to study sea level at the present time. Fremantle, along with Sydney has the longest record of sea level measurements in Australia, going back to 1897. 

Nearby Rottnest Island is the site of famous studies of sea level variation over the past few thousand years, including some sea levels a few metres higher than present.

In the last two years several papers have been published showing there is no reason to be alarmed over sea level rise and several alarmist papers also appeared (see references). Some alarmists claim there will be a rise of several metres by the end of the century. In this article, prepared for The Council for the National Interest WA (CNI),* we see why cherry-picking of data is a real cause for concern. 

There are two basic methods of estimating future changes in sea level: direct observation by tide gauges or by satellites, and computing by models.

Tide gauges are set up at stations to measure sea level at regular intervals. Technology has improved over time. While it is commonly assumed adjacent land is stable, it is known that some land is moving either up or down relative to the sea. The longer and more complete the record the better. The Fremantle record starts in 1897. Another station was set up at Hillarys in 1992. The records are shown in Figs. 1 and 2 (bottom of article).

Without statistical manipulation the Fremantle data appears to show a slight rise but nothing alarming, although there are some exceptionally high tides, and low tides (note 1941 and 1993).

The Danish press reports the case of a garden centre going out of business because of nearby wind turbines. Headaches are frequent among employees, and female workers complain of unusual bleeding and problems with their menstruation cycles.  They are worried that more serious illnesses may follow and five of them recently resigned from their jobs. The owner is now closing shop for fear of being held responsible should a child be born with deformities, as happened to numerous mink puppies at a fur farm near wind turbines in Jutland (1).

Boye Jensen, the owner of Lammefjordens Perennials, is 67-year-old. He started his plant nursery 43 years ago, and it became a prosperous business with 15 employees and annual sales of 12 million krones (equiv. $ 2.1 million). He was planning to continue working for another 6-7 years, then sell the nursery. But his business is now worth nothing, causing him an important financial prejudice.

He is presently consulting with his lawyer whether he should sue Vattenfal, the company that owns the wind turbines, or the Municipality of Holbaek, which approved their installation 400-700 metres from his garden centre. He will go to court, and seek damages worth several million krones.

Certain western governments and their science advisers think that alternative energy sources (like wind and solar power) and biofuels in particular are the salvation from “climate change,” previously called “global warming.” 

Are doctors confused by statistics? A new book by one prominent statistician says they are – and that this makes it hard for patients to make informed decisions about treatment. 

In 1992, shortly after Gerd Gigerenzer moved to Chicago, he took his six-year-old daughter to the dentist. She didn’t have toothache, but he thought it was about time she got acquainted with the routine of sitting in the big reclining chair and being prodded with pointy objects.

The clinic had other ideas. “The dentist wanted to X-ray her,” Gigerenzer recalls. “I told first the nurse, and then him, that she had no pains and I wanted him to do a clinical examination, not an X-ray.”

These words went down as well as a gulp of dental mouthwash. The dentist argued that he might miss something if he didn’t perform an X-ray, and Gigerenzer would be responsible.

But the advice of the US Food and Drug Administration is not to use X-rays to screen for problems before a regular examination. Gigerenzer asked him: “Could you please tell me what’s known about the potential harms of dental X-rays for children? For instance, thyroid and brain cancer? Or give me a reference so I can check the evidence?”

Astrophysicists have come up with compelling evidence that the ocean inside Saturn’s largest moon Titan is as salty as Earth’s Dead Sea, making it an unlikely location for alien life. 

The British Medical Association (BMA) is facing a backlash from Scottish doctors who say it is not doing enough to investigate the effects of giant wind turbines on the health of people living near them. 

Residents who live within a few miles of wind turbines have complained of chronic sleep deprivation due to the whirring of the blades, while others report nausea and headaches linked to the low frequency sounds they emit.

The symptoms are collectively known as Wind Turbine Syndrome, yet the Sunday Times reports that a meeting of BMA representatives was last month urged to support renewable energy due its purported benefits in mitigating the effects of climate change.

It was even suggested that if the BMA – which acts as a trade union of doctors – holds any assets in fossil fuel companies, it should switch them to “those providing renewable energy sources.”

Some doctors are now angry that the BMA is apparently ignoring pleas to address the public health impact of wind farms. The European Platform Against Windfarms (EPAW) had been lobbying the BMA to address the health of patients within close proximity of turbines, yet this was not considered at their meeting

A BMA spokeswoman said that EPAW had made contact after the deadline for submissions had passed, and added that the BMA does not make direct investments.

An EPAW spokeswoman said, however: “That a vote was subsequently taken at the meeting to divest from fossil fuels and invest in renewable energy without members having had access to the information we sent raises an issue of conflict of interests. Since May, attempts were made to have information given to members concerning adverse health effects of turbines. These attempts failed.”

For nearly a century, “reality” has been a murky concept. The laws of quantum physics seem to suggest that particles spend much of their time in a ghostly state, lacking even basic properties such as a definite location and instead existing everywhere and nowhere at once. Only when a particle is measured does it suddenly materialize, appearing to pick its position as if by a roll of the dice. 

The AGW community would have you believe that the science in favor of AGW is settled. As a professional scientist, a physicist with 40 years experience in aerospace and extensive knowledge of atmospheric physics, I can tell you that, indeed, the science is settled, but not the way the AGW extremists would have you believe.  Atmospheric transmission measurements taken in the 1950s demonstrate conclusively that increasing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere cannot be the cause of global warming if global warming even exists.

A basic principle of science is that correlation does not prove causation. Climate scientists are working overtime fudging temperature related data showing global warming over many decades that correlates with the industrial revolution and increasing use of carbon-based fuels. Climate scientists are boldly asserting that this correlation proves global warming is caused by increased CO2 in the atmosphere.

Real scientists would demand to know the physics of how increased CO2 in the atmosphere causes global warming.  Is there any real physics behind this unsupported bold assertion?  As I am about to explain, based on test data from the 1950s, there is not.

There are three points I want to make that fall in the categories of physics and atmospheric physics. First, molecules in the atmosphere absorb lightwaves over what are called spectral bands. The spectral band can be narrow, as small as a single wavelength, or broad, covering a continuum of wavelengths or frequencies. This molecular absorption causes increased vibration within the molecule exciting certain vibration modes. The physics of each molecule determine which wavelengths can be absorbed to excite internal vibrations. Spectral band absorption in the atmosphere can be quantified based on measurements over a certain distance through the atmosphere such as “90 per cent absorption in this spectral band over a distance of 300 meters at sea level through the atmosphere”.

The second point is not really atmospheric physics, but more fundamental. Objects like the earth emit a spectrum, or wavelength continuum, of radiation that is completely described by “Planck’s Law” of black body radiation, derived in the 1900 by Nobel-winning physicist Max Planck. That curve predicts the peak intensity of light from the sun in the visible spectral band, and the peak intensity of light emitted by the earth in the LWIR spectral band. Planck’s curve has been validated by experimental data for over a hundred years, and was a huge breakthrough for the physics community in the 20th Century.

The BBC Trust has issued a new report into progress on adopting the recommendations of the Steve Jones review of science coverage. This was the integrity-free publication that recommended keeping sceptics off air as much as possible.

According to the new paper, the BBC has been holding a series of seminars to bang home the “keep sceptics off air” message and will keep up this re-education programme in the future. There’s also this:

“The Trust wishes to emphasise the importance of attempting to establish where the weight of scientific agreement may be found and make that clear to audiences. The Trust also would like to reiterate that, as it said in 2011, “This does not mean that critical opinion should be excluded. Nor does it mean that scientific research shouldn’t be properly scrutinised.” The BBC has a duty to reflect the weight of scientific agreement but it should also reflect the existence of critical views appropriately. Audiences should be able to understand from the context and clarity of the BBC’s output what weight to give to critical voices.“

Given that we know that BBC editors are telling their staff not to allow scientists to appear opposite anyone who might disagree with them, I would suggest to readers that the paragraph quoted above is entirely mendacious. And the idea that the English literature graduates and environmentalists who infest the BBC are going to “properly scrutinise” scientists is beyond contempt. It is simply a case of putting two fingers up to the general public.

It’s time to close the BBC down.

Read more at www.bishop-hill.net

Climate alarmism is “the biggest fraud in the field of science” and the 97{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} consensus claim is nonsensical, Apollo 7 astronaut Walter Cunningham tells MRCTV in a preview of his presentation at the upcoming Heartland Institute climate conference, July 7-9.

“Since about 2000, I looked farther and farther into it,” Col. Cunningham (USMC, Ret.) tells MRCTV in an exclusive interview. “I found that not one of the claims that the alarmists were making out there had any bearings, whatsoever. And, so, it was kind of a no-brainer to come to the conclusion.”

Cunningham rejects the notion of man-made climate, not only as fact – but also as even qualifying as an actual “theory”:

“In the media, it was being called a theory. Obviously, they didn’t know what it means to be a theory.”

“If we go back to the warmist hypothesis – not a theory, but, a hypothesis – they’ve been saying from the very beginning that carbon dioxide levels are abnormally high, that higher levels of carbon dioxide are bad for humans, and they thought warmer temperatures are bad for our world, and they thought we were able to override natural forces to control the earth’s temperature. So, as I’ve looked into those, that’s the problem that I’ve found, because I didn’t find any of those to be correct – and, they certainly were not a theory, it was just their guess at what they wanted to see in the data they were looking at.”

Cunningham urges Americans to look at the data and decide for themselves, instead of taking anyone else’s word for it:

“You go out and take a look at it and you find out that a lot of it is pure nonsense and wishful thinking on the part of the alarmists who are looking for more and more money to fall into their hands.”

“Don’t believe it just because your professor said it. You gotta go take a look at it. Go back and look at the history of temperature and carbon dioxide, and you look at the value of carbon dioxide, and how it’s a benefit today.”

Professor Ken Baldwin
Director Energy Change Institute
The Australian National University
Building 141, Linnaeus way
Canberra, ACT, 0200

Dear Professor Baldwin,

On Wednesday 28th May 2014, Tony Dale and I attended a presentation you gave at a community forum run by the University of the Third Age (U3A) in Canberra. The topic was the future of renewable energy in Australia. You made a number of comments there that we think were misleading, either by omitting relevant information regarding renewable energy or exaggerating the effects of climate change.

According to my notes, your introduction included the statement   “it is imperative to reduce our carbon emissions to combat global warming”………. “we need to move away from using fossil fuel”.

As you surely must know, it is carbon dioxide, not black carbon, that is emitted from fossil fuel fired  power stations. CO2 is a transparent trace gas which is essential for all plant life. Its solid state is dry ice, therefore impossible to be emitted upwards from the point of combustion. It is neither a pollutant or a warming agent. You were extremely misleading when you referred  to it as “carbon emissions”. The listener was led to believe that you were referring to some form of ‘black carbon’. Some forms of black carbon are pollutants, albeit at a regional level.  However, as you must be aware, Clean Air Laws, were introduced in most industrialised nations more than a century ago.  The  result is that black carbon (soot) is no longer emitted into the atmosphere. Further, Australia’s  coal and its power stations are amongst the cleanest in the world. 

A study done by John Christy (IRRIGATION-INDUCED WARMING IN CENTRAL CALIFORNIA?) has been touted by some as being “proof” that humidity causes an enhanced “greenhouse effect”.

The conclusions drawn in the paper are based on the following two graphs (the red trend lines were added for clarity):

At first glance the increase in the daily minimum temperature (just before sunrise) exceeds the decrease in daily maximum temperature (~2:30PM) giving the impression that there was an over-all increase in the daily mean temperature from 1930-2000, but look at the scale. Each line in the TMin graph is 2 °C while each line in the TMax scale is 4 °C.

So, as you can see the daily minimum temperature increased about 2 °C while the daily maximum temperature decreased by about 2 °C meaning that the overall affect of irrigation on the daily mean temperature was nil. Rather, the affect of irrigation in this study shows that ground water decreases the diurnal temperature swing. This is not surprising since water has a higher specific heat than does dry soil. As a result the specific heat of wet soil is nearly double that of dry soil.

The sea ice coverage around Antarctica over the weekend marked a record high, with the ice surrounding the continent measuring at 2.07 million square kilometers, according to an environmentalist and author who says the ice there has actually been increasing since 1979 despite continued warnings of global warming. 

The new record was posted for the first time by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s online record, The Cryosphere Today, early Sunday morning.

It’s not apparent if the record actually occurred on Friday or Saturday, says Harold Ambler on his blog, Talking About the Weather.

Ambler is a journalist and author of the book “Don’t Sell Your Coat: Surprising Truths About Climate Change.” 

“The previous record anomaly for Southern Hemisphere sea ice area was 1.840 million square kilometers and occurred on December 20, 2007,” said Ambler. Meanwhile, he pointed out, global sea ice area on Sunday was standing at 0.991 million square kilometers above average, a figure he arrived at by adding anomalies for the North and South hemispheres.

Hawaii is a favorite vacation destination. There the ocean is blue and the plants enjoy a lush environment. Though I’ve never been to that paradise, my white and red-blooming Hawaiian Queen-of-the-Night plants keep growing and bloom every year. 

But the islands of Hawaii have more to offer; for example live volcanos like Kilauea and Mauna Loa (pictured). The Earth’s largest volcano, Mauna Loa, appears once again to be awakening from its decades-old slumber.

Volcanology is the science of volcanos, when, where, and how they erupt, how much lava and gases are being expelled with how much force, et cetera. If you like to get to the nitty-gritty of that, try visiting the Oregon State University web site and similar ones. Volcanos come in many varieties. Some explode every few hundred years with cataclysmic blasts of gas and pumice, others are content to regularly send out slow-moving lava streams which you can watch as it flows downhill, twisting and bulging as they progress.

More importantly, if it gets too hot underfoot you can leisurely walk away to cooler grounds. Not so in other areas of the world which experience powerful eruptions; occasionally so powerful that they affect all life on earth.

Cataclysmic Eruptions

Cataclysmic volcanic eruptions are known to have occurred on earth repeatedly.

For example, the eruption of Mt. Toba in Indonesia approximately 75,000 years ago was such an event. It blasted nearly 3,000 cubic kilometers of ash into the air, together with one thousand million tons of sulfur dioxide and probably even more carbon dioxide. The effect on the earth’s climate was severe. It caused an estimated drop of 10 C (15 F) for several years.

In comparison, Mt. St. Helens’ (Washington) blast in 1980 was a pipsqueak. Toba’s blast was approximately 1,000 times stronger than that of St. Helens’ though that blast was the biggest ever recorded in U.S. history.