Abstract:

Any solar system planet or satellite with a thick atmosphere shows a positive Greenhouse Effect (GE) according to NASA. The average planetary surface temperature and the average longwave radiation flux seen from space has both been measured extensively. This information provides a basis to calculate the planetary (global) GE. Hence, the NASA planetary GE values for Venus, Earth, Mars and Titan are 510, 34, 0 and 10 degrees Kelvin (NASA 2016). It can and should be questioned why the GE differs so much on different planets. A way to come closer to an answer is to calculate a number of regional GEs (RGE) on earth and study their variations.

This is possible since the outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) has been measured carefully during many years by several space crafts. It is possible to calculate an average emission temperature for any specific region on earth. Gridded monthly data of both OLR and surface temperature for selected regions averaged over many years were provided by www.cdc.noaa.gov (2009), data which have been used in this study. It turns out that the RGE values on earth varies between about minus 10 to plus 52 Kelvin depending on a number of physical factors. The RGE value was highest in Amazonas and lowest at the South Pole. The RGE values were above the average of 34K over the oceans and in equatorial regions strongly suggesting an impact of water vapor concentration as an important factor. Which physical mechanism that probably is dominating the GE value on earth and any planet with a dense atmosphere is discussed.

Once welcome as a clean alternative for producing energy, wind turbines in Germany are today faced with ever more hostile political and social environments.

As the turbines increase in size, so do their impacts on people and ecosystems that are near them. In the southern German town of Winterlingen hundreds of people recently packed into a sports facility to listen to a talk by sound expert, Dr. Johannes Mayer on the effects of low frequency sound, so-called infrasound, on humans. Ten years ago not even a handful would have shown up.

But today as interest in the adverse effects of infrasound from wind turbines are surfacing and becoming a major public issue, citizens who face the possible invasion by a wind park are taking a keen interest in the topic.

Nearly two decades and $108 million worth of “disturbing” data manipulation with “serious and far ranging” effects forced a federal lab to close, a congressman revealed Thursday.

The inorganic section of the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) Energy Geochemistry Laboratory in Lakewood, Colo. manipulated data on a variety of topics – including many related to the environment – from 1996 to 2014. The manipulation was caught in 2008, but continued another six years.

“It’s astounding that we spend $108 million on manipulated research and then the far-reaching effects that that would have,” Rep. Bruce Westerman said at a House Natural Resources subcommittee hearing. “We know how research multiples and affects different parts of our society and our economy and … if you’re working off of flawed data it definitely could be in a bad way.”

Killed more than 500,000 people.

Andrew McKillop has a new article posted at The Market Oracle. Here are some excerpts.

This is the global cooling fear

Intense flooding in the low countries of Europe became “darkly repetitive” during the Little Ice Age, writes McKillop. The cooling period  lasted 450 years,

For the Dutch, the Grote Mandrenke is nothing to do with Linux software, but means “The Great Drowning” and is named for the epic and massive flooding that occurred, more and more frequently in the Low Countries of Europe’s North Sea region as Europe’s Little Ice Age intensified.

Recent posts have stressed the complexity of climates and their component variables. However, global warming was invented on the back of a single metric: rising global mean temperatures the last decades of last century. That was de-emphasized during the “pause” but re-emerged lately with the El-Nino-induced warming. So this post is focusing on that narrow aspect of climate change.

There are several papers on this blog referring to a quasi-60 year oscillation of surface temperatures due to oceanic circulations. I have also noted the attempts by many to make the link between solar activity (SA) and earth climate patterns.

Dan Pangburn is a professional engineer who has synthesized the solar and oceanic factors into a mathematical model that correlates with Average Global Temperature (AGT). On his blog is posted a monograph (here) Cause of Global Climate Change explaining clearly his thinking and the maths.  I am providing some excerpts and graphs as a synopsis of his analysis, in hopes others will also access and appreciate his work on this issue.

The deep, dark ocean bottom teems with far more oases of life than once thought.

Searching along the sunless seafloor where tectonic plates pull apart, regions known as spreading ridges, researchers discovered that heat-spewing hydrothermal vents are at least three to six times as abundant as previously assumed. The finding also significantly boosts the likely number of marine ecosystems huddled around vents, the researchers report in the Sept. 1 Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

The Rev. Thomas Bayes was, as the honorific the Rev. suggests, a clergyman. Too bad he wasn’t a lawyer. Maybe if he had been, lawyers today wouldn’t be so reluctant to enlist his mathematical insights in the pursuit of justice.

In many sorts of court cases, from whether talcum powder causes ovarian cancer to The People v. O.J. Simpson, statistics play (or ought to play) a vital role in evaluating the evidence. Sometimes the evidence itself is statistical, as with the odds of a DNA match or the strength of a scientific research finding. Even more often the key question is how evidence should be added up to assess the probability of guilt. In either circumstance, the statistical methods devised by Bayes are often the only reasonable way of drawing an intelligent conclusion.

On some planets that orbit whirling stars, spring and autumn might be the best time to hit the beach, whereas summer offers a midyear respite from sweltering heat. These worlds’ orbits can take them over regions of their sun that radiate wildly different amounts of heat. 

“Seasons on a planet like this must be really strange,” says Jonathon Ahlers, a graduate student at the University of Idaho in Moscow, who presented his findings June 15 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

UK science will have to fight to make sure it is not an after-thought as Britain renegotiates its relationship with the EU, say research leaders.

The science establishment expressed its “disappointment” on Friday with the referendum’s outcome.

It had been in the “remain” camp.

The decision to leave the EU now means new structures will have to be put in place if the science sector is to continue to enjoy favourable access to the union’s programmes and funding.

To understand the “greenhouse effect” hypothesis do this experiment:

1. Schedule a transfer of $100 from your checking account to your savings account.

2. Schedule to occur simultaneously a transfer of $100 from your savings account to your checking account.

3. Then check the balance on both accounts to see if either was affected by this action.

Unless your bank has some serious accounting problems you will find that the effect of this action will be “null” or zero—the balance in both accounts remained the same. This experiment reveals a question that is at the heart of the “greenhouse effect” hypothesis debate. Did the bank actually do the transfers or did they just leave the money where it was? Yes, those transfers will appear on your bank statement, but nothing changed; the effect of this action was “null”.

Now do this second experiment:

1. Take a radiometer down into an empty cellar that is in a state of thermal equilibrium at 12C and let the emissivity of each wall be 0.95.

2. Take readings of all four walls.

3. Take temperature readings of all four walls at the same time to see if the temperature anywhere is changing?

You will find that the readings on the radiometer when pointed at all four walls is ~356 W/m² and that the temperature of all four walls remains constant throughout. Here again is a question that is at the heart of the “greenhouse effect” hypothesis debate. Are the walls of the empty cellar constantly exchanging ~356 W/m² of energy with one another or is all of the internal energy within walls just staying where it is seeing as how there is no change in the temperature of the walls? Those who believe in the “greenhouse effect” hypothesis insist that the west wall is transferring 356 W/m² of energy to the east wall, while the east wall is transferring 356 W/m² of energy to the west wall and the north wall is transferring 356 W/m² of energy to the south wall while the south wall is transferring 356 W/m² of energy to the north wall.

Key Point: Even if this exchange of Prevost’s Energy is real and not imaginary its effect is “null”. That is, an equal exchange of energy between two bodies of matter will not affect the temperature of either.

Let’s now take a look at the Trenberth, et al Earth’s Global Energy Budget diagram which has been used extensively as proof of the existence of an atmospheric, radiative “greenhouse effect”.

John Casey, a former space shuttle engineer and NASA consultant, is out with the provocative book Dark Winter: How the Sun Is Causing a 30-Year Cold Spell, which warns that a radical shift in global climate is underway, and that Al Gore and other environmentalists have it completely wrong. The earth, he says, is cooling, and cooling fast.

First I must credit Joseph Postma for alerting me to the existence of Horace’s (easier to write than de Saussure) hot box.  For May 31, 2016 he posted an article—The Radiative Greenhouse Effect & Ontological Mathematics—on his website—Climate of Sophistry.  Horace’s hot box was the focus of this article.  

So having no knowledge of Horace’s hot box I went to the internet and found: “He [Horace] had constructed the first known Western solar oven in 1767, trying several designs before determining that a well-insulated box with three layers of glass to trap outgoing thermal radiation created the … highest temperature—230 °F.” (Wikipedia)   

At http://solarcooking.org/saussure.htm I read:  “the increased use of glass during the eighteenth century made many people aware of its ability to trap solar heat. as Horace de Saussure, one of Europe’s foremost naturalists of the period, observed: “it is a known fact, and a fact that has probably been known for a long time, that a room, a carriage, or any other place is hotter when the rays of the sun pass through glass.”

Ocean experts have called for international action to generate the kinds of maps of global seabeds that space missions have already returned for the Moon and Mars.

The call to “map the gaps” comes from GEBCO, the General Bathymetric Chart of the Ocean, a body first set up in 1903 to compile maps from naval surveys around the world.

But more than a century on from the first international charts, vast expanses of the ocean are still represented by just a single point where an ancient mariner threw a lead-weighted rope over the ship side.

A paper recently published attempts to measure the relationship between ice accumulation and temperature in Antarctica for the last 31000 years.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016GL068356/full

Night-time vision evolved millions of years ago in early mammals, a study suggests.

The photoreceptors that help us see in dim light developed from colour-detecting cone cells in Jurassic mammals, according to genetic evidence.

The evolution of night-time vision is regarded as a landmark event in the rise of mammals.

A nocturnal lifestyle allowed the first of their kind to avoid predatory dinosaurs, say scientists.

Co-researcher Dr William Ted Allison of the University of Alberta, Canada, said the development of night vision was a “critical step” in the dominance of mammals.