Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) is the term used for the unusually large die-offs in honey bee colonies over winter. First observed about a decade ago, the “disorder” is back with a vengeance. While most prevalent in the US, European and other countries are starting to find similar problems though not yet at the same scale.

The Problem

The problem is that there are not enough bees around to guarantee pollination of a variety of agricultural crops. From almond groves in California to corn and soybeans farms in the Midwest, CCD is widespread and appears to be on the verge of becoming a global problem.

Theories

Numerous theories have been advanced in the hope of finding a cause for the problem. So far none has panned out.

For example, some types of chemical pesticides, known as neonicotinoids have been implicated. However, other studies have shown that there does not appear to be any cause-effect relationship of that kind.

Other theories implicated genetically modified (GM) plants such as GM-corn containing the gene of Bacillus thuringiensis. Again, that was disproven as a probable cause of CCD by tests showing that pollen from such plants had no detrimental effects on bees.

Naturally (pun intended), even climate change has been proposed as the cause for CCD, an effect yet to be listed on the warmlist’s collation of claimed effects. Pun aside, I have my own theory, backed by some relevant observations.

Independent climate analysts crunch the numbers to prove that hurricanes are a more powerful driver of climate than so-called greenhouse gases. Dr. Pierre R Latour, a leading industry expert in thermodynamics, has peer-reviewed the latest newsletter from long-time climate skeptic, Dr. Vincent Gray and affirmed Gray’s calculations to be correct.

Dr. Latour, who first made his name assisting in the engineering of NASA’s Apollo space mission agrees that Dr. Gray’s analysis points to the greenhouse gas effect (GHE) being trivial (if, indeed, it does exist) when compared to the actual energy manifested in hurricanes. Gray is noted as the only expert reviewer of all five reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Latour, Principia Scientific International’s (PSI) lead expert on thermodynamics affirms what other industry experts had long suspected. “We know that hurricanes can never create or consume energy. All they do is transform the energy received into the Earth’s system and move it around,” says Dr. Latour. Unlike climatologists Latour is an engineer trained to the highest standards in thermodynamics. He can’t understand why modern academics are incapable of discerning what an earlier generation of climate researchers knew to be true: carbon dioxide is just not a factor at all in the climate equation.

Dr. Pierre Latour has peer-reviewed Dr. Gray’s numbers and confirms that “This analysis supports my long held contention measuring the average temperature of the whole atmosphere is impossible. Measuring any change in that average over years or decades is even harder.” It is the overwhelming power of evaporation, condensation, rain, storms and wind energy – seen at their most dramatic in hurricanes – that tell us the hydrological cycle is the key, not any trace gas like CO2. “Water is the great leveler in the system,” Latour insists, “It all averages out if you wait long enough. Turbulent fluid flow is well known.”

Lord Nigel Lawson, Chancellor in Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s government in the 1980’s, issues a public statement that Sir Paul Nurse, the President of the Royal Society, is a global warming liar.

In his boldest attack yet on the frontman of Britain’s crumbling climate alarmist establishment Lord Lawson has thrown down a gauntlet that Nurse is not likely to pick up.  Lawson, former holder of the second highest office of government, has responded to Paul Nurse’s wild accusations that Lawson was cherrypicking data when he stated that global temperatures have been flatlining for 17 years. Lawson’s open letter published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (February, 27, 2013) where Lawson is Chairman, states:

“You [Nurse] claim that I “would choose two points and say ‘look, no warming’s taking place’, knowing that all the other points that you chose in the 20 years around it would not support his case”. That is a lie.”

Sir Paul Nurse, who won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine, is described in the letter as more a  “shop steward for some kind of scientists’ closed shop” rather than the figurehead of Britain’s most prestigious science body.

The death knell tolls for the Carbon Dioxide Greenhouse Gas Theory (CO2-GHT). If the CO2-GHT ever was a plausible theory, it is rapidly turning into a giant hoax. The perceived scientific underpinnings of the theory are unravelling fast. It took a while to get the “Anti-CO2-Warmist-Theory” scientific camp on the right footing. Now, Principia Scientific Intl. (PSI) has taken the lead in dispelling the last of the CO2-GHT “consensus”-based vestiges.

The latest nail for the CO2-GHT coffin has been contributed by Dr. Charles R. Anderson with his article “The Most Essential Physics of the Earth’s Temperature and Why Carbon Dioxide is No Threat to the Earth.” This comes hard on the heels of a recent paper on “The phase relation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature” by Dr. Ole Humlum and coworkers. Their work showed conclusively that the regular seasonal variations in the atmospheric CO2 levels are lagging the sea surface temperatures by 9.5 to 12 months — not the other way.

Britain’s deeply unpopular Climate Change Act (2008) may be set for repeal as another politician joins the growing number of MP’s aghast at the damage it is having on the nation’s ailing economy.

Conservative Member of Parliament, Douglas Carswell’s mea culpa today (February 25, 2013) shows dignity and acceptance of the weight of evidence conflicting with the already scientifically dubious notion of human-caused global warming.  “My biggest regret as an MP is that I failed to oppose the 2008 Climate Change Act. It was a mistake. I am sorry,” said Carswell on his blog.

The announcement comes hot on the heels of last week’s surprise admission by Rajendra Pachuari, the UN’s head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Dr. Pachauri conceded that we are now into a 17-year pause in global temperature rises, as confirmed recently by Britain’s Met Office. Even NASA’s most strident climate doomsayer, Dr. James Hansen concedes there has been “a pause” in any temperature rise.

An examination of the energy budgets for the Earth of recent years gives one reason to be unsettled about the settled science claimed for the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis.  The energy budget currently posted by NASA is shown in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1 shows the principal NASA energy budget for the Earth as of February 2013.  Note the huge surface radiation and the huge radiation from the atmosphere all of which is absorbed by the surface.  The surface-absorbed atmospheric down radiation is 100{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the solar insolation at the top of the atmosphere and it is all claimed to be absorbed by the surface!  The greenhouse gases absorb a very unrealistic 90{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of all of the radiation emitted from the surface!

The scholarly peer review system may be functional for normal science or puzzle solving routine science in the sense of Kuhn, but is not well suited to handle non-normal new science challenging an existing paradigm. This is because any new idea poses a threat to existing normal science and as such often meets overly negative reviews by referees without sufficient knowledge of the novelty. Correct new science may thus get rejected without good reasons,  but is also possible that incorrect new science can get accepted by uncritical referees.

Furrther, incorrect normal science may be perpetuated by the peer review system, because incorrect normal science can only be questioned by new science.

In short, the peer review system is not suitable to handle new science, because either (i) good articles are rejected on bad grounds, or (ii) bad articles are accepted without good grounds. 

An example of new science is given by the article New Theory of Flight presented on The Secret of Flight. The article was rejected by AIAA Journal and is now under review by Journal of Mathematical Fluid Mechanics JMFM. 

JMFM has a difficult case to handle: Referees from normal science of fluid mechanics are not eager to touch the article and if so the review will be negative because the existing paradigm is challenged. On the other hand referee’s from outside the fluid mechanics community under AIAA may not be able to give a credible review.

For many the field of chemistry is a terra incognita, an unknown world. This is odd if one considers that humans are virtually chemistry factories, ingesting, processing and producing chemicals throughout our lives. We routinely use a wide variety of chemicals without ever thinking of them in those terms, from detergents to medications. Besides, with all kinds of wonderful electronic gadgets, who needs to know anything about chemistry or chemicals anyway? On top of that, we are constantly told that chemicals are dangerous to our health. Everything else, including meteorites are too.

 

Neanderthals

You might not believe it, but the Neanderthals (80,000 years ago) and their later cousins, the Cro-Magnon people (30,000 years ago) had an inkling of chemistry. Their cave paintings in France and Spain survived for tens of thousands of years simply because they used extremely stable, mineral-based pigments including mercury, iron and manganese type minerals. For example, just look at any of the many pictographs from ancient caves around the Pyrenees (Fig. 1). They appear to be done yesterday, clear and crisp. The lesson is to use stable pigments for your art; some knowledge of chemistry helps for that.

Fig. 1. Pregnant mare running through wild wheat; pictograph from the wall of a cave in Lascaux, France, dating to 15,000 to 10,000 BC; photo courtesy of http://frontiers-of-anthropology.blogspot.ca.

An incredible new paper in the reputed Global and Planetary Journal using freely available government data may be about to cause an unwelcome storm for believers in the greenhouse gas theory and the ‘green’ carbon reductions industry. It’s publication is accompanied by a surge in highly-credentialed scientists joining dissenting fledgling science body, Principia Scientific International.*

Norwegian scientists led by Professor Ole Humlum of the University of Oslo analyzed measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide and compared them to temperatures with an astonishing result that throws serious doubt on claims that climate change is carbon related. If verified by other scientists Humlum’s study will confirm the findings of researchers at Principia Scientific International (PSI) who claim they have already refuted the greenhouse gas theory.

NOAA and HADCrut CO2 levels graph (click to enlarge)

The scientists investigated the phase relation (leads/lags) between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperatures using standard data series for the period January 1980 to December 2011. They found that changes in global atmospheric CO2 follow 11–12 months behind changes in global sea surface temperature and 9.5–10 months behind changes in global air surface temperature. The findings conflict with the consensus view concerning the greenhouse gas ‘theory’ that says the opposite should happen with temperatures supposedly being driven by any rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2 levels are up 40 percent in recent decades).

by Professor Cliff Ollier

School of Earth and Environment, University of Western Australia. 

To demonise CO₂ yet again, a false claim is that human production of CO₂ will cause the oceans to become acid. ‘Acid’ is an emotive word to the general public, which is why it is seized upon by the alarmists in their search for yet another scare. In reality increasing CO₂ makes the ocean become ‘less alkaline’, but never ‘acid’.

pH is a measurement of the amount of hydrogen ion concentration in a solution, the log of the hydrogen ion concentration with the sign changed. Because it is a log scale it is very hard to move a pH of 8.2 to 7.0, which is neutral.

The pH needs to be less than 7 to be ‘acid’, and this has not happened through at least the past 600 million years because it would dissolve limestones, and limestone have been deposited in the sea and not re-dissolved in the sea through all that time.

Many marine organisms need CO₂ to make their coral skeletons, carbonate shells and so on. Corals also have symbiotic plants within their flesh that use CO₂ in photosynthesis.

In the ongoing intellectual war where the traditional scientific method is battling the rise of “post normal science” the Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (AWED) has struck a blow for real science. Engineers expose ten unfixable wind turbine problems that make then unreliable not renewable.

AWED spokesman, John Droz Jr. a qualified physicist and environmentalist steps up his organization’s campaign to ensure policymakers are presented with the cold hard facts on so-called “renewables.”

Having established a powerful grassroots network of informed individuals and organizations interested in improving national, state, and local energy & environmental policies AWED has hit on the correct nomenclature for that fair weather energy source: wind. Rather than putting wind farms in the “renewables” category AWED found they are very much the “unreliables.”

The problem, says, Droz, is that “Instead of a science-based approach, our energy and environmental policies are typically written by those who stand to economically or politically profit from them. As a result, anything genuinely science-based in these policies is usually inadvertent and accidental.”

Eminent sea level experts from the Indian subcontinent are pulling the plug on alarmist media claims that the region is set to be awash with ever-rising sea levels due to man-made global warming.

In their sights are such science news stories typified by ‘Climate change forcing thousands in Bangladesh into slums of Dhaka’ appearing in The Star, Canada (February 17, 2013). Last week we reported how Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner, a Swedish scientist and ‘The Golden Chondrite of Merit’ award winner from Algarve University, latched onto a similar junk story by The Star touting that sea level rises are due to humans.

This week Dr. Mörner, adviser to Principia Scientific International on sea levels, brings out the big guns to shoot down misguided journalists who continue to present a one-sided story. Particularly galling to the experts are those claims that climate change is due to humans, makes people poor and forces them to live in the slums of Bangladesh and India. The Star’s article supposedly addresses sea level rises but disingenuously asserts, “Every monsoon, when the slum is overrun with rainwater, cholera and malaria outbreaks are common.”

By Prof. Roger Pielke Jr.

I have just participated in a lengthy Twitter exchange with Marshall Shepherd (@DrShephard2013), a professor at the University of Georgia and President of the American Meteorological Society. The occasion for the exchange was Dr. Shepherd’s presentation yesterday at a Congressional Briefing sponsored by the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (his prepared remarks can be found here in PDF). The briefing focused on “the latest trends and scientific evidence related to the growing impacts associated with climate change.”

Three other scientists testified at the briefing, but I am not interested in what they had to say. Shepherd’s remarks are of interest because he is the President of a major scientific society. He was not at the briefing to present his personal opinions, but rather in his role as a leader and representative of the scientific community. Thus, in my view of the obligations of such a role, he had a duty to play it straight.

Unfortunately, as is so often a case when leaders in the climate science community find themselves before an audience of policy makers, on extreme events they go rogue, saying all sorts of things with little or no scientific basis. Even if the scientist includes many accurate statements in his/her remarks (such as the reality of significant risks of human-caused climate change), the presence of horsemeat ruins the lasagne.

By Dan Pelton

Staff Reporter, Orangeville Citizen

As this was being written Tuesday night, the area was being drenched by what looked remarkably like an April shower, with the temperature soaring into double digits. But when you step outside to pick up your paper this afternoon, the forecasters say you will be in a paradise … for polar bears.

So far, the winter of 2012-13 has featured temperatures both well above and the normal high of about –4º C. There have been few days when they were actually normal. While some experts are pointing to climate change as a pivotal factor in weather fluctuations, Environment Canada’s senior climatologist says temperature changes are par for the course.

“There’s a difference between climate and temperature,” explained David Phillips in an interview.

“The wild swings in temperature have had nothing to do with climate. It’s about where the winds come from.”

The recent warming trend, for example, was caused by breezes blowing in from the southern United States.

By Heinz Hug

(Nachrichten aus der Chemie, 61: 132 [2013)

Translated by Klaus L.E. Kaiser, 12 Feb. 2013

[sub-title] Heinz Hug questions the importance of CO2 for climate change

“According to our calculations, in the coming years, it should get warmer by leaps. But we do not trust that prognosis. Because the simulations should also have been able to predict the current standstill of the temperature increase – which did not happen.” That according to the climate researcher Jochen Marotzke of MPI-M in Hamburg, according to the Spiegel [magazine] of 9/2012. The reasons why climate models fail are obvious.

It is to be emphasized that the [discussion about the] greenhouse gas effect does not concern the absorption by IR-trace gases (CO2, CH4, H2O, and similar) but their emission, which warms the earth’s surface via “back-radiation” [Ruckstrahlung], [ref. 1]. In fact, satellite spectra of 667 cm^-1 show an impressive “funnel within the Planck curve” which is based on the impediment of the warmth-radiation from the earths body by the ν[nu]₂-band of CO2, [ref. 2].

Times are moving fast and Science and Nature magazine can’t cope. Caught resting on their laurels these eminent mainstream publications have again been exposed as inept or biased when it comes to peer-reviewing the papers submitted to them.

The latest blow concerns the questionable peer review policies of these “top” journals. These denizens of academic publishing are being pulverized in the blogosphere for their inflexibility and conservatism more in keeping with the bygone era of traditional paper and print publishing. Signaling the revolution this week are astute analysts from various quarters. Leading Aussie science blogger, Jo Nova, reflects the mood in the climate science community lamenting:

“The peer review system has decayed to the point where the culture of the two “top” science journals virtually guarantees they will reject the most important research done today. It is the exact opposite of what we need to further human knowledge the fastest. Science and Nature are prestigious journals, yet they are now so conservative about ideas that challenge dominant assumptions, that they reject ground-breaking papers because those papers challenge the dominant meme, not because the evidence or the reasoning is suspect or weak.”