The Waubra Foundation has just issued an “Explicit Warning Notice” (1) to wind turbine manufacturers, developers, acousticians and governments worldwide.

Recently “rediscovered” research funded by the US Department of Energy and involving NASA and multiple other research organizations has shown that the health damaging effects directly caused byinfrasound and low frequency noise (ILFN) emitted by wind turbines have been known to the wind industry, governments and acousticians in general, since 1985 (date of the official field study led by Dr. Neil Kelley). But this health risk has been covered up ever since, denounces the Foundation. “Health authorities have been careful to exclude ILFN measurement and exposure limits from noise regulations”, said its CEO, Dr. Sarah Laurie. “To this date, they continue to deny any problem exists with ILFN emitted by wind turbines, ignoring complaints of victims and their right to be protected against known health hazards from industrial installations”.

The wind industry argues that modern turbines are different, but it has not proved that they are safe with respect to the emission of ILFN. The onus is on them, and on the health authorities, to “prove a positive”, argues the Foundation. “Like any product, it must be tested to be safe before it is sold”, says Dr. Laurie. “There is gross negligence on the part of the authorities for approving modern wind turbine installation close to habitations without having verified that these machines are harmless.”

In view of this, and in the name of thousands of victims, the European Platform Against Windfarms (EPAW), and the North American Platform Against Windpower (NA-PAW), are hereby demanding that governments immediately:

1) – adopt the evidence-based health protective ILFN exposure limits recommended by Kelley in 1985;

2) – wherever wind turbine neighbors complain of effects on their sleep and/or health, monitor in their homes the full spectrum of noise pollution and infrasound down to 0,1 Hz, accurately, transparently and independently of wind developers, and

3) – actively enforce regulation breaches, ensuring affected neighbors are able to have the non-compliant wind turbines turned off at night so they can sleep.

“Sleep deprivation has been used as an effective means of torture and a technique for extracting confessions,” stated Dr. William Hallstein in his recent letter to the Board of Health of Falmouth, Massachusetts. (2)

Dr. Neil Kelley said in a recent interview: “ (subsequent research found that) the majority of the physics responsible for creating the annoyance associated with this (1985) downwind prototype are applicable to large (modern) upwind machines.” (3) Dr. Laurie concludes: “wind turbine designs may have changed, but human physiology has not”.

Fads come and go, but sometimes they stay around and, after a while, everyone wonders how the world ever lived before. The question here is whether electric cars are just another fad or are they the beginning of a whole new way of doing things, such as going to the beach, or grocery shopping.

In order to get a handle on that question, let’s look at some critical information.

Energy Equivalency

First, consider the amount of a typical gas tank’s worth of electric energy. Let’s say your car has a tank of 50 L (approximately 15 US gallons) gasoline. The energy equivalency is 33.4 kWh (kiloWatt-hours) per gallon of gasoline. Therefore, if your car had batteries and an electric motor only and everything else being equal, you would need a battery system with a storage capacity of approximately 10 times the number of kWh of the number of liters of gasoline; therefore 500 kWh of electric energy storage.

Energy Efficiency

The internal combustion engine (ICE) has a lower efficiency of energy (fuel to usable power) conversion than an electric motor (EM); roughly 27{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} compared to 80{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} for the EM. In other words, the ratio of stored power to usable power for the EM is approximately three times that of the ICE. Therefore, in calculating the effective cost of running an electric car this also needs to be considered.

Cost of Electricity

Nationwide, the average residential cost of electric power is in the order of 12.5 cent/kWh, prior to additional costs. Adding those additional costs would bring it to somewhere in the $0.15 to $0.20 range per kWh, depending on other conditions such as “cost of delivery”, taxes and so forth. With that, to “fill up” your electric car with 500 kWh of electricity would cost about $90 on average.

Daniel Wolf Savin and Michael Hahn have been fascinated by the universe since they were boys. For Savin, a senior research scientist in the Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory, discovering Albert Einstein at age 12 spurred the desire to “learn everything about the universe.” Years later, Hahn, an associate research scientist who grew up 40 miles from Savin’s home town in Connecticut, started gazing at the stars as a teenager; he eventually became president of the astronomy club at his alma mater, Carnegie Mellon.

Now the two have made a big leap toward cracking one of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics—why the corona, or plasma surrounding the sun, is so much hotter than the sun’s surface.

The coronal heating problem, as it is known, is important because the corona is the source of solar wind, which is responsible for the northern and southern lights and can also disrupt telecommunications and power grids. “Satellites can be slowly pushed out of their orbits if they’re deflected by the solar wind so if we can better understand the cause, we can create better models for space weather,” says Savin, referring to conditions beyond the atmosphere.

Alternative fuels have failed to catch on because they require a major adjustment in the way society works. Here’s an alternative to that.

Considering the fact that over 10{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of crude oil is used for jet fuel, it appears that refined oil is going to be around for a long time.

 

If you can’t beat ‘em, then join ‘em, says Herskowitz. With a revolutionary system for making gasoline out of hydrogen extracted from water, and from carbon dioxide, two of the most common substances on earth, Herskowitz believes that he and his team at Ben-Gurion (including Prof. Miron Landau, Dr. Roxana Vidruk, and others at BGU’s Blechner Center for Industrial Catalysis and Process Development) have come up with the one alternative fuel that can succeed on a wide scale.

A teacher in South Korea wrote to ask me for more information about global warming theory, to help his class. Below is an excerpt of my reply.

In regard to CO2 and global warming, the two have become so linked in the public mind that the warming mechanism itself (the Greenhouse Effect) is seldom referred to or discussed. Rather, it’s taken for granted. For a detailed explanation of this mechanism, then, I’d refer your students to MIT professor Richard Lindzen’s essay Greenhouse Effect.

In Lindzen’s piece your students will discover that the popular notion of the Greenhouse Effect differs from the accepted scientific explanation. The popular view has it that gases like carbon dioxide absorb and trap thermal radiation (infrared light), thus keeping the Earth warm by reducing its ability to release heat-rays to outer space.

In this view “greenhouse gases” function much like a blanket or winter clothing. As this infrared image suggests, after all, a body that’s inhibited from releasing heat-rays will cool off more slowly, which is the same as saying “will stay warmer.”

Has a critical new element in the climate fraud been uncovered? Independent British researcher, Derek Alker, attending the UK lecture tour of Australian climatologist, Dr Murry Salby, stumbles on an apparent critical flaw in climate models. Alker finds the models are dependent only on carbon dioxide (CO2) to change temperature. Incredibly, the models seem to be pre-programmed so that no other atmospheric variable is allowed to alter climate. Read Alker’s full analysis below:

How the IPCC models human emissions of CO2

accumulating in earth’s atmosphere

By Derek Alker (November 18, 2013)

Wednesday, 26th May, 2010, 09:03 pm in post ten of this thread at the Global Warming Skeptics.info forum. Dr.Jonathan Drake published one of the most important posts I am aware of thus far in the ongoing climate debate. At the time I did not realise the full significance of it, nor it seems did anyone else. But it is worth noting that Dr. Drake and I had discussed this on a prior occasion without fully ascertaining its import.

Thursday, 7th Nov, 2013, 07.00pm I attended Professor Salby’s lecture at the Links Hotel, Edinburgh, as part of a series of talks sponsored by Ken Coffman (Stairway Press) and Principia Scientific International. The lecture was titled Climate: What we know and what we don’t. The relevant part of his lecture can be viewed in a video from his earlier lecture given in Hamburg on the April 18, 2013 (specifically between 53 minutes to 1 hour and 2 minutes).

Background
Consensus scientists and the IPCC state there is a dominant residence time in excess of 100 years for human emissions of CO2 in earth’s atmosphere. This arises due to a “need” within the “theory” of a greenhouse effect (the scientific underpinning of supposed human-caused global warming) to have the facts fit the emissions data of increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2). All such official data is measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory (MLO).

The UN’s latest Climate Conference (COP19) in Warsaw marks an astonishing new low for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Despite 50,000 angry Polish protesters demanding an end to the shameless fakery of the ‘science’ about man-made global warming, the IPCC now claims that:

“during the last hundred years … the sea level increased for the first time since the last ice age,” Tom Nelson reports.

The claim will come as a big surprise to some of the world’s leading oceanographers. As the journal Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) recently reported, such a claim is readily discredited. Peer-reviewed studies by experts in sea level rises (not climate ‘scientists’) suggest that no only have sea levels gone on rising irresistably for the last several thousand years, but that there is compelling new evidence pointing to the existance of multidecadal cycles in the historical mean sea level observations from many ocean basins.

Don Chambers from the University of South Florida led the research team that found that tide gauge records from across the globe show oscillations with a period of about 60 years in all ocean basins except the Central/Eastern North Pacific. [1]

Oceanographers are still grappling with the implications of these findings, which seem to suggest a 60-yr quasi oscillation of sea levels. If so, these oscillations are remarkably similar to those identified in other earth/climate systems including ocean circulation, global mean surface temperatures, large-scale precipitation patterns, and atmospheric pressure, among other things.

According to the Worldwatch Institute, the US Department of Agriculture Secretary, Tom Vilsack, is pushing for an increase of the current maximum of 10.2{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} ethanol in gasoline to 15-20{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117}. Much of that is supposed to come from corn and, later, from cellulose (wood).

Under the current federal “Renewable Fuel Standard” the US is already slated to increase its use of biofuels from 9 billion gallons in 2008 to 36 billion gallons by 2022. That standard does not even include the proposed increase of the ethanol content of common gasoline.

The proposed revision would be a really bad idea and let me tell you why. 

Fuel Supply

To begin with, the idea is a red herring. There is no shortage of automotive fuel or its precursor, crude oil. The production of crude oil in the US already has substantially increased as shown in the graph below and continues to expand. Current predictions are that the US will actually become a net oil EXPORTER in a few years’ time.

For that reason alone, there is absolutely no need to “adulterate” good gasoline with ethanol.  However, there are far more compelling reasons to steer away from the ethanol mandate altogether.

Engine Problems

There is no shortage of potential engine problems with such a mandate. You may as well kiss your car/pickup/motorcycle/ATV, lawnmower, outboard, generator and other engines good-bye. Gasoline with that kind of ethanol content will kill most of them in short order, especially in areas of colder climes. To begin with, many engine and connecting parts cannot withstand the corrosive or solubilizing properties of ethanol when present at higher than 10{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} in gasoline. For example, gaskets and the like in older engines (pre-2000) cannot withstand its effects. Furthermore, gasoline, at any temperature and level of activation will not react with aluminum but alcohol (ethanol) will when the metal’s protective oxide layer is compromised. Without that protection, for example, aluminum would readily dissolve in water.

When you put climate change in this context the problem distills down to nothing more than a claim based on computer model projections so the obvious solution to the problem is to show why the computer model projections are wrong. This is why from day one I have targeted the forcing parameter of the computer models which is a pure fabrication created to project catastrophic warming from CO₂ when none is physically even possible.

To attack the CO₂ forcing parameter it is critical to determine the claimed basis for the forcing parameter which requires a lot of digging and going back through references, and in the process of doing this one is exposed to a wide variety of information that is not normally considered. Through this digging although the explicit basis for the genesis of the forcing parameter is never stated in general terms it is based on a 100ppmv increase in atmospheric CO₂ concentration from 280 to 380ppmv and an accompanying 0.6°C increase in global temperature. Other information gleaned is that the forcing parameter is of the form 5.35ln(C/C_o) and this is converted to temperature with a climate sensitivity factor of 0.75°C/W/m².

 Given this it is a simple matter to test the viability of the forcing parameter to see if it gives results consistent with the global temperature record. Derek Alker’s fresh analysis concurs with my own, as set out below.

If science was driving this issue the 33 years of cooling with a fourfold increase in global CO₂ emissions from 1942 to 1975 would be all that is needed to debunk the computer model projections but as this is not an issue of science but one of belief simply stating facts is of little value in exposing the fraud.

Climate Change although never actually defined to any scientific or legal standard is generally accepted to mean global warming caused by increased CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels. Last year the Hadley Centre under scrutiny resulting from “climategate” had the unfortunate circumstance of the HadCRUT3 dataset showing more global cooling since 2002 than any of the other datasets and especially the UAH and RSS MSU satellite based datasets. 

This meant a decade of cooling with increasing CO₂ and a death blow exposing the climate change fraud. Hadley revised the dataset to HadCRUT4 which although it did not eliminate the decade long global cooling it reduced the cooling to near zero. (http://www.climate4you.com/ )

Without realizing it the Hadley Centre had produced a temperature graph with a linear best fit to 1997 showing zero global warming and sent this data to the IPCC where it was incorporated into this graph from the unauthorized release of IPCC 5AR by Alec Rawls (see below).

 This graph shows that global warming had already ended by December 1997 when the Kyoto Protocol was initiated to stop global warming! This makes every claim in support of the Kyoto Accord completely fraudulent as well as making all claims in IPCC 2001 AR3 and IPCC 2007 AR4 completely false as well. This is where the head of the UN can be taken to task for reprehensibly blaming Typhoon Haiyan on climate change when climate change means global warming and global warming officially ended 16 years ago!

This is the form of attack that needs to be made demanding that the wording used be defined in true terms by any making these claims. 

There is no science involved just fraud so silly arguments about scientific misconceptions. What needs to be exposed is the fraud and this is perfectly laid out for us in the PBS interview of Timothy Wirth which Tim Ball has often pointed out.

Wirth served under President Clinton in the State Department. He is now president of the United Nations Foundation and he organized the 1988 Senate hearing at which James Hansen addressed global warming.

In the interview Wirth admits to compromising the air conditioning before the crucial US Congressional hearing of 1988 when NASA’s Dr James Hansen gave, what many analysts believe, was the crucial testimony that swayed policymakers into believing global warming was a serious problem.

 Asked whether he had cynically altered the temperature in the hearing room that day Timothy Wirth replied:

“… What we did it was went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right? So that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room and so when the, when the hearing occurred there was not only bliss, which is television cameras in double figures, but it was really hot. …”

“So Hansen’s giving this testimony, you’ve got these television cameras back there heating up the room, and the air conditioning in the room didn’t appear to work. So it was sort of a perfect collection of events that happened that day, with the wonderful Jim Hansen, who was wiping his brow at the witness table and giving this remarkable testimony.”

Wirth went on to lead the U.S. negotiating team at the Kyoto Summit. In the 1975 Newsweek article about our cooling world the term used was the grammatically correct “climatic change”

With only 13 years separating the end of a 33 year period of global cooling from Hansen’s 1988 presentation he was not going to use the term global warming and with zero actual physical evidence for his fabricated computer model projections Hansen resorted to what is called “consensus science” and simply claimed 99{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} certainty!  

The one thing that Hansen didn’t do that day in front of your committee is use the term “global warming.” He said, “Gentlemen, I’m 99 percent sure that human beings are contributing to climate change,” but he didn’t quite have the nerve, because he was outside scientific consensus at the time.

Oh, Hansen went a long way. This was a very, very brave statement. He was on the edge of the science and almost 20 years younger than he is today, so he’s relatively new in the field. He’s working for the federal government, and certainly this was not cleared far up the line, what he had to say. So the summary of what Jim Hansen had to say that year, plus the fact that it had gotten so much attention from the press — it was on every channel, Hansen was widely reported. He went as far as anybody could possibly have expected him to go, I think. Again, it was a very brave thing for him to do.

But the whole thing is a fabrication and my approach is, and always has been, to refute this fraudulent conjecture with hard physical evidence. 

 

Hello Warsaw: Greenland ice loss will be OK ‘even under extreme scenarios’

COMMENT TO FASULLO, J.T., C. BOENING, F. LANDERER, AND R.S. NEREM, AUSTRALIA’S UNIQUE INFLUENCE ON GLOBAL SEA LEVEL IN 2010-2011, GEO. RES. LETT., 2013, IN PRESS

Albert Parker

al***********@****il.com

The lack of global warming over this century in the measurements of ground and deep oceans temperatures and the lack of positive acceleration in the measurements of sea levels suggest that the climate models have greatly exaggerated the influence of the anthropogenic carbon dioxide emission. However, rather than feeling uncomfortable with possibly wrong theories, many authors have recently re-focused their attention from “warming” to “weather extremes”, blaming climate “variability” and “uncertainty” for the lack of warming, or sorting out the most unrealistic explanations for the lack of warming of temperatures and accelerations of seas as it is the case of the claimed storage of 4.572·10¹² m³ of water in Australia discussed in the commented paper.

The latest news about global warming report of temporary falls of the rate of rise of sea levels because of formation of Lake Eyre in Australia.  “Global sea level has been rising as a result of global warming, but in 2010 and 2011, sea level actually fell by about a quarter of an inch. Scientists now say they know why: It has to do with extreme weather in Australia. The sea level drop coincided with some of the worst flooding in that continent’s history. Dozens of people died and torrents washed away houses and cars, forcing thousands from their homes. Some of those floodwaters simply ran back into the ocean, so they didn’t affect sea level. But a lot of that water was trapped on the Australian land mass. That’s because the continent has an odd geography.” writes Richard Harris [1] reporting on a work recently published by John Fasullo and others in the paper here commented [2].

The claim by Fasullo surprisingly accepted in the peer review is that “Australia’s hydrologic surface mass anomaly is responsible for the fall in the reconstruction of global mean sea level.” Apart from the fact that the global mean sea level (GMSL) reconstructions are not measurements but very questionable computations, it appear unbelievable that the natural formation of Lake Eyre in the centre of Australia can be considered responsible for a drop of a quarter of an inch in the GMSL.

Mexican study affirms a 1951 finding by top American scientists that carbon dioxide (CO2) cannot cause global warming. Applying known scientific values, more eminent scientists are coming forward to confirm that atmospheric CO2 mixes with clouds and water vapor to cause only cooling. As such, the credibility of “consensus science” claims about man-made global warming being caused by rises in CO2 levels are left in serious doubt.

Professor Nasif Nahle (Monterrey, Mexico) provides a peer-reviewed paper, ‘Determining the Total Emissivity of a Mixture of Gases Containing Overlapping Absorption Bands,’ that uses known and well-established values from the results of experiments performed previously by H. C. Hottel, B. Leckner, M. Lapp, C. B. Ludwig, A. F. Sarofim, et al, showing that the combined effect of overlapping absorption bands of water vapor with CO2 causes a reduction on the total absorptivity of the mixture of those gases in earth’s atmosphere. As such, water vapor and CO2 are proven to combine to cause global cooling, not warming.

Nahle’s paper affirms the long-forgotten findings of the eminent former head of Britain’s Met Office, CEP Brooks, and the American Meteorological Society (AMS) that also revealed that CO2 in the atmosphere could not cause warming. Brooks, Britain’s top climatologist at the time, along with America’s best meteorologists agreed that the idea that CO2 could warm the climate:

“was never widely accepted and was abandoned when it was found that all the long-wave radiation [that would be] absorbed by CO2 is [already] absorbed by water vapor.”

[see:“Geological and Historical Aspects of Climatic Change.” In Compendium of Meteorology, edited by Thomas F. Malone, pp. 1004-18 (at 1016). Boston: American Meteorological Association]

Scientists at Principia Scientific International (PSI), who peer-reviewed Nahle’s paper, are currently advising colleagues that the most reliable data available now confirms that CO2 is shown to act as a coolant in earth’s climate. As such, the notion of a so-called ‘greenhouse gas’ warming effect may be regarded as refuted, while environmental measures by governments and individuals to reduce “carbon emissions”  to combat climate change are, in turn, rendered pointless.

Based on the earlier book by John D. Hamaker and Donald A. Weaver “The Survival of Civilization” (1982), Weaver also published a companion book “To Love and Regenerate the Earth” (2002). Both books are available freely as electronic (pdf) files from www.soilandhealth.org.

The main idea in both works is the “re-mineralization” of soil as a means to produce better yields of agricultural products. This re-mineralization essentially means adding finely ground rock powder to mineral-depleted or mineral-lacking soil. Without doubt, finely ground rock from almost any source will provide potassium and phosphate-type minerals that are vital for plant growth. However, grinding rock to a fine powder requires not just the equipment but a large amount of energy as well.

Believers in the greenhouse gas theory, the cornerstone of the science of man-made global warming, often refer to a select history of researchers and key papers to bolster claims for a “settled science.” But here we expose just how flimsy is its provenance. Below is exposed the flaws in such seminal works by James Hansen, Richard Lindzen, the National Academy of Science (NAS) and others. This article is a summary of six articles located at the author’s blog (Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part 6).

The ‘Charney’ Report

We begin with the NAS, the pinnacle of American science, as we delve into how the major academies of sciences played their roles in the greatest travesty of modern science. ‘Charney’ is a  seminal 13,000-word report about earth’s climate from 1979 and NOWHERE in those 13,000 words does it mention the term ‘greenhouse gas effect’ or any such derivative of the term.

Also, nowhere does ‘Charney’ speak of our planet being ’33 degrees warmer than it would otherwise be;’ (a common GHE meme) and no mention of “back radiation heating” and/or delayed cooling due to carbon dioxide (CO2). And who was among the key authors? None other than NASA’s James Hansen and Richard Lindzen!

It seems utterly plausible to infer that uncertainty about the science of the greenhouse gas effect (GHE) was the reason why Hansen, Lindzen and their eminent co-authors omitted to include mention of the term, or of the mechanism whereby CO2 causes warming/delayed cooling in the atmosphere.

Hate-filled Response

When I published those six articles I enraged a slew of global warming afficionados, mostly from Skepticalscience.com attacking me on this crucial technical issue. My blog became filled with irate accusatory comments. In response I pointed out that nowhere in this major report were the best brains in the business able to put a name to what they described. As I told them: settled science requires settled nomenclature.

[This article originally published as: GHG Theory 33C Effect Whatchamacallit (Pierre R Latour, PhD, Houston, January 15, 2012) at climatechangedispatch.com]

GHG Theory was invented to explain a so-called 33C atmospheric greenhouse gas global warming effect. In 1981 James Hansen [1, 2] stated the average thermal T at Earth’s surface is 15C (ok) and Earth radiates to space at -18C (ok). Then he declared the difference 15 – (-18) = 33C (arithmetic ok) is the famous greenhouse gas effect. This is not ok because there is no physics to connect these two dissimilar numbers. The 33C are whatchamacallits. This greenhouse gas effect does not exist.

Here is the science for what is happening. Thermal T is a point property of matter, a scalar measure of its kinetic energy of atomic and molecular motion. It is measured by thermometers. It decreases with altitude. The rate of thermal energy transfer by conduction or convection between hot Th and cold Tc is proportional to (Th – Tc).

Radiation t is a point property of massless radiation, EMR, a directional vector measure of its energy transmission rate per area or intensity, w/m2, according to the Stefan-Boltzmann law. It is measured by pyrometers and spectrometers. Solar radiation t increases with altitude. Black bodies are defined to be those that absorb and radiate with the same intensity and corresponding t. Real, colorful bodies reflect, scatter, absorb, convert and emit radiant energy according to the nature of the incident radiation direction, spectrum and body matter reflectivity, absorptivity, emissivity and view factors. The rate of EMR energy transfer from a hot body, th, is Q, w = 5.67Ae(th + 273)4, where A is radiating area and e is emissivity fraction. But it may not be absorbed by all bodies that intercept it, as GHG theory assumes. In particular, hotter radiating bodies do not absorb colder incident radiation and reemit it more intensely, as GHG back-radiation theory assumes.

Above Earth’s stratosphere, thin air T is rather cold, about -80C. Yet solar radiation t is rather hot, about 120C. So spacesuits have thermal insulation and radiant reflection. The difference, 200C, is meaningless. On a cold, clear, winter day on snowcapped mountains, dry air T = -10C and radiation t = 50C. I can feel them both.

The Sun moves the atmosphere, rules the weather and is the energy source for all life on Earth!

The Sun as an energy source

The Sun is the source for life on Earth and has a direct influence on most of the physical processes within the Earth’s atmosphere. Sunlight provides the energy for photosynthesis within plants, which in turn creates the atmospheric oxygen required for us to breathe. The solar daily cycle regulates our lives, and the solar annual cycle determines the seasons and hence the agricultural cycle. Yet the role of the Sun in determining the sate and behavior of the Earth’s climate is much greater than just a simple observation of its warmth would lead us to suppose. The Earth’ atmosphere is literally solar-powered, the Sun being the primary cause of all the atmosphere processes, including the General Circulation, the formation of clouds and the generation of both local and global wind patterns.

The Sun, at the centre of the Solar System, is a typical star 1.392.000 km in diameter, with a mass roughly 1 000 times that of the rest of the Solar System combined. Like most stars it is composed mainly of hydrogen (≈70{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117}), with most of the remainder being helium. The Sun generates its heat and sustains itself from nuclear fusions in the core where the temperature reaches some 15 million °C, and in which an estimated 600 million tones of hydrogen are converted into helium every second. The total solar output into space is 2.33×10²⁵ kJmin^-1, but only a tiny fraction (1/2.000.000.000), i.e. one two thousand millionth, of this is actually intercepted by the Earth since the energy received by any planet is inversely proportional to its distance from the Sun. Owing to the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, the receipt of solar energy on a surface normal to the Sun is 7{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} more on 3 January at the perihelion (when the Erath is closest to the Sun) than on 4 July at the aphelion when the Earth is furthest from the Sun. The “solar constant” is therefore not a constant. The “solar constant” changes from 1416 W/m² at the beginning of January to 1321 W/m² at the beginning of July.