Monthly Archives: April 2021

Climate change continued…

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Sunday, April 25, 2021

Although Earth’s warming of the past 50 years has brought enormous good to life on this planet, today’s hardcore Alarmists insist great trouble lies ahead.  They’d like to stop the warming in its tracks.  Why?  As far as anyone knows, Earth has no ideal temperature.  There is no exact temperature for Earth.  Over geological time, this planet has been warmer than now; it’s also been colder.  Life has acclimated to every bump.  The Climate Alarmists have made a major cause out of proclaiming that won’t work this time!  Do you know how many times various groups have declared the end of the world?  Too many to count.  And this current Climate Crisis will meet the same fate.

What’s the problem?  The theory being used to predict the end of life as we know it is WRONG.  Back in the days of the “science is settled” era, it seemed so easy.  Carbon dioxide is a major factor in Earth’s climate.  When CO2 increases Earth warms.  The amount is well defined – roughly .9 deg. C  if you double the amount in the atmosphere.  We believe the atmospheric concentration of CO2 back in the late 1800’s was about 275 parts per million (ppm).  Now it’s about 416 ppm.  But, a change that slow is hardly a problem.  No need to raise the crisis flag.

It’s all about the secondary effects of warming.  The theory further states that warming will lead to more water evaporation.  That will produce more clouds.  Those clouds will trap more heat near the surface.  So that actual warming is compounded to more than the CO2 contribution.

It all seemed so logical.  But when they started building forecast models, the models seemed to forecast much more warming than was being observed.  As described earlier, although the predictions have improved, they still are considerably warmer then reality.

Now let’s call in Nobel Prize winning American physicist Richard Feynman…“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”   As it turns out, Feynman really had these Climate Crisis people figured out.  Another quote:  “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”  As mentioned before, the Climate Advocacy groups are currently more about public relations than science.

Why are the models wrong?  In a word, sensitivity.  In a few more words, sensitivity measures how much clouds alter Earth’s temperature.  The “settled science” theory says clouds have a net warming affect on heating (positive sensitivity).  But, clouds also reflect a good bit of solar energy before it reaches the surface.  If clouds bounce away more heat than they trap, it’s a net cooling (negative sensitivity).

We’ve been trying to figure out Earth’s sensitivity to clouds for over 100 years.  Surface-based trials all say slightly positive.  Looking from the top down, satellite studies are mixed – some positive, some negative.  A large mixed study over the western Pacific recently resulted in a slight negative trend.

Nobody knows the answer.  My thoughts are that the sensitivity is variable.  Over various time frames and areas, we have regions of positive and negative sensitivity at work.  How they add up over a year or so will not always be the same.  I believe that the use of a constant positive sensitivity in the climate models is a primary reason for the excessive warming they predict.

One more note on sensitivity before we switch topics.  I’ve mentioned the IPCC and its reports using many climate prediction models.  Over 100 models were used in the 2019 report. Only one model (from Russia) came close to the actual temperature trend of the past two decades.  Besides being more realistic, what made this model different from the 100+ others?  The Russian model is the only one to use a negative sensitivity!  Interesting.

Stuff

Another quote to portray the current status of (most) climate modelers around the globe.  This quote is attributed to Albert Einstein.  He may have said it, but he didn’t originate it.                       “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

I think we may be entering a paradigm shift.  Next time…

Earth Day continued

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Friday, April 23, 2021  5 P.M.

Yesterday, I mentioned that the past 50-75 years have been the best time ever to be a human on this planet.  Currently, we have the smallest percentage of people living in poverty and hunger that Earth has ever seen.  (It would be even better if politicians were more benign.)  What has brought about this sudden, rapid improvement in worldwide living conditions?  Global warming is the primary reason.

We had some warming after World War II, then cooling during the 1970’s.  Since then we’ve had a slow warming trend –  as measured by satellites, it’s 0.14 deg. C per decade.  The Green Revolution has been a main benefactor of the warming.  Some people who study this stuff say that continued warming will provide far more benefits than harm for another 1-2 deg. C warming.  For some reason, the majority of modern environmentalists ignore the good news.

If the above is true, what’s all the “Climate Crisis” talk about?  The story begins on a hot summer day in Washington D.C.  in 1988.   Senator Al Gore and Dr. James Hansen (NASA) presented to a climate committee a scary report concerning rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  In a nutshell, the message was (somewhat exaggerated) we’d better stop the CO2 increase soon or we’ll all be dead.

Perhaps there’s a clue to their intentions. The previous evening Gore and Hansen rigged the air conditioning system in the committee  room so that it would not cool that night.  Thus the room would be very warm for the hearing.work  Then, before their presentation,  they visited a rest room to toss water on their shirts, especially the underarms.  Then, as they approached the podium, they took off their suit coats to “emphasize” just how hot it was.  So, the “Climate Crisis” began as a bit of “show biz” and it still is.

A mantra came out of the committee hearing – “The science is settled.”  That wasn’t true then and it still isn’t now.  Not surprisingly, you don’t hear that statement much anymore.

The climate forecast models from the 1980’s predicted Earth’s temperature increase expected by 2020 THREE TO FOR TIMES larger than it has turned out to be.  That’s “settled” science for you.  Over the years, the models have improved somewhat.  The  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC), an United Nations organization which handles this problem for the world, issued its most recent update in 2019.  (Another report is due later this year.)

The average of climate models (over 100) used for the 2019 report is now predicting a rate of warming TWICE as high as the observed temperatures.  An early look at a sample of models to be used in the 2021 report shows even higher levels of excess warming than the 2019 report.

So the models are getting closer, but are they reliable enough to spend trillions of dollars to avert a “crisis” that currently is showing no evidence of being a crisis?   Climate change is nothing new, it’s been going on forever.  What have humans been doing for the past 500,000 years when the climate changed?  They’ve adapted.  A better word is acclimated.

Brief note:  Today we pronounce acclimated as AK li ma ted.  It hasn’t always been that way.  The Webster’s I took to college  way back when said the word was  ah CLI ma ted.  Adjusted to the climate!

So what’s the problem?  Do we think the current climate is perfect?  Our announced actions seem to say “yes.”  So we’re going to re-engineer nature to keep our climate where it is?  Good luck with that.  For a huge variety of reasons (known and  unknown) Earth’s climate is always changing.  And, yes, some of that change is caused by us.  We have to do what we’ve always done – acclimate!

More next time…

 

 

 

Happy Earth Day

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Thursday, April 22, 2021  5 P.M.

Lot’s of things have changed since the first Earth Day in 1970.  Our air is much cleaner; so is our water.  The warming of Earth has brought huge gains in agriculture and our ability to feed our rapidly growing population.  We are approaching 8 billion of us on this planet.  True, we still have 100’s of millions of underfed people, but the problem is not our ability to  raise enough food!  No, the problem is political.  (Forced starvation, after all, has been a major military tactic for eons.)

The reason we’ve been able to raise so much food was called the “Green Revolution” years ago.  Improved farming methods have helped.  But the primary reason agricultural production has increased so much so fast  is biochemistry – genetically improved crops have enabled us to feed the world.  The Green Revolution has been one of the most important aspects to our much improved living conditions worldwide over the past 50 – 75 years.

Although environmentalists (the so-called “greens”) embraced the Green Revolution at first, now it appears that a large part of the green-culture now thinks GMOs are a bad thing and should be eliminated.  To me, this amounts to “Stop GMOs…let half the world starve.”  I just can’t understand what thought process goes through the minds of anti-GMOers. Don’t they know that ever since agriculture began, farmers have been genetically altering crops through natural selection (Does the name DARWIN ring a bell?).  No crop today is anything like its ancestors centuries ago.  Genetic modification is a wonderful thing.  And now it’s gotten better since we can save many years by doing it in a lab rather than out in the fields. In essence, every crop we grow is a GMO.  Maybe the anti-GMO folks should chew on that for awhile.

The Earth Day environmentalists have gone awry in other areas as well.  Just today, President Biden said we’re  going the cut our carbon dioxide production by 50% by 2030.  There is only  one way that can happen.  Shut down the country.  You thought Covid restrictions were bad?  Wait until you see what 50% less carbon does to us.  To accomplish this task, the U.S. would go from Earth’s biggest economy to Third World status in just nine years!

Even a more realistic goal to cut carbon 50% by 2050 can only be done by  switching our power source to nuclear.  Yes, nuclear.  I know that’s a dirty world in the U.S. and especially to environmentalists, but keep in mind no one in the U.S. has ever died from a nuclear power plant accident.  How does that compare to deaths in the coal, oil and gas industries?  And modern reactors are smaller, mostly underground and highly reliable.  It’s definitely the way to go.

Continued tomorrow…

 

From 70 degrees to snow in 12 hours?

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Tuesday, April 20, 2021  6 P.M.

It could happen tonight!

Our weather has been pretty dull lately.  Dull in the sense that not much “weather” has been nearby.  So most of April has been quite pleasant.  The absence of typical stormy Spring weather has allowed a great opportunity to see more of nature’s awakening beauty.

But, tonight’s weather could be highly unusual.  A small, but very cold, upper air system will drift over us tonight.  It’ll bring along a pocket of colder air behind a developing cold front.  That will provide enough lift to squeeze some moisture out of the atmosphere.  It won’t be much (less than a quarter inch) and won’t last long (from about 10 P.M. to 4 A.M.).  However, the upper level cold air will produce snow.  The big question will be “How soon will the surface cold air arrive.” At onset, the snow will be melted by the currently mild air so we’ll see rain.  The rain will help cool (by evaporation) the low-level temperatures.  That, along with the colder air advancing into our area, will create rapidly falling temperatures.  By about 2 A.M. temperatures should drop into the upper 30’s.  Then, the colder air will slow the melting process.  Basically, the smaller snow flakes will melt while the larger flakes should be able to make it to the surface before completely melting.  Over the next two hours temperatures may drop another degree or two, so at times it may become only very wet snow.  Then, by 4 A.M.  the steady rain/snow will move east of our area.

Snow accumulation?  Not likely on the ground or roadways.  However, some tree limbs, rooftops and cars/trucks could see small accumulations.

Then we’ll have a couple of unseasonably cool days before Spring returns.

Stuff

36 degrees is the 50%-50% temperature for rain and/or snow. Above 36 the odds rapidly favor rain.  Below 36, the odd rapidly favor snow.

Guns:  Since 1975, guns have been responsible for  the death of 1.5 million Americans. Since the Revolutionary War, about 1.4 million Americans have died in all U.S. wars and conflicts.  (Seems like our “well armed militia” is better at killing Americans than enemy combatants.)  Does anyone see a problem here?