K & T Energy Budget

Click on image above for full view

Basically what this says is that, because Earth cannot create heat and can only absorb and reflect what comes from the Sun, it's not possible for heat reflected, by so called green house gases, to be greater than the Sun's.

Most everyone knowledgeable on this subject has heard of the “K&T Energy Budget” (Click on diagram). So how did Kiehl and Trenberth help debunk climate alarm? 

We have energy incoming from the Sun…thats the 342 W/m^2.  Well sure, the Sun is a source of energy, it is powered by nuclear reactions which liberate energy.

And then we have energy incoming from “greenhouse gas backradiation”.  There’s 168 + 67 = 235 absorbed energy coming from the Sun…and then there’s 324 coming from the atmosphere, 38% more energy than from the Sun.

It just magically appears over there, on the right hand side of their diagram.

Now the sun has a nuclear power source of energy.

The atmosphere has no source of energy, no source of power, has no chemical or nuclear reactions going on to liberate energy.

It is thus impossible for the atmosphere to be a source of energy, let alone to provide 38% more energy than comes from the Sun.

This debunks climate alarm science, without any additional consideration required, since this is the “reasoning” it subscribes to in general.  Climate alarm is based on the impossible, and the nonsensical.  It’s from these types of energy budgets that alarm is created.  Well yes, these diagrams are indeed alarming, for their amazing mind-boggling obvious errors.

And why do Kiehl and Trenberth, and climate alarm, get into such a mess?  Of course, it’s because they don’t get the incoming energy from the Sun correct in the first place.  Their “168 absorbed by surface” means that Sunlight could only ever make a surface it strikes to heat up to -40 degrees Celsius.

Wow, that’s pretty cold.  Can’t sunlight melt ice?  Isn’t much, much warmer sunshine actually responsible for driving the climate?  Yes and yes, but this is contradicted and denied by Kiehl and Trenberth’s pseudoscience.

So who’s wrong?  Is the Sun wrong, or is Kiehl and Trenberth wrong?

It’s pretty easy to see who.

This week we are told that 'warming is continuing'.

Ok I am not a climate scientist but I have read enough science on climate change to know that books must've been cooked for this week's media release by The Met. Office . 

There has already been enough eminent confirmation that there has been no global warming since 1997. Of course we know that we have been steadily climbing out of the Little Ice Age, when there used to be ice skating on the Thames, and that was the origin of our Christmas card scenes too. But that seems to have plateaued off since 1997 and by all accounts we are headed back down again too.

So yes climate has been getting warmer for some 200 years but contrary to it being anthropogenic, it is just one more wave in a cyclic history and warming seems to have stopped. So how does that square with this week's reports? Well this is the answer. Read here how the Warmists are still cooking the numbers! 

It seems all greens are nasty about their religions.

From Local Transport Today by Andrew Forster

Lawson rails against ‘religious fervour’ of the climate change ‘alarmists’

“I have never in my life experienced the extremes of personal hostility, vituperation and vilification which I – along with other dissenters, of course – have received for my views on global warming and global warming policies'. He says. 

Yes and you see the same attitudes against pro drivers from the anti driver religion too Nigel. Read on.

Policies to dramatically cut carbon dioxide emissions are politically, economically and scientifically irrational, says the former chancellor Lord Lawson, who thinks alarm about man-made climate change has similarities to religion

Lawson: computer models “scarcely worth the computer code they are written in”

Andrew Forster

Fear about man-made climate change doesn’t feature quite so prominently in the transport policy debate today as it did five or ten years ago but it continues to be a fundamental building block in how policy-makers frame ‘the transport problem’. With the exception of grassroots organisations such as motorist group the Alliance of British Drivers, there appears to be universal acceptance within the transport sector that man-made climate change is real, that it poses a serious threat to life on this planet, and that we should mitigate its impacts by dramatically cutting carbon dioxide emissions.

But how will historians look back at this thinking? Nigel Lawson thinks the judgment will be very harsh indeed. The former Conservative chancellor wrote a book in 2008, An appeal to reason: a cool look at global warming, and a year later set up a think-tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, to challenge what he regarded as widespread misinformation in the scientific, political and economic debate about global warming. The Foundation’s director is Benny Peiser, who LTT interviewed in 2006 and 2008 as climate alarm reached its peak in the UK, with the Government’s world-leading Climate Change Act 2008 committing the UK to cut carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by 80% by 2050 against 1990 levels.

Lawson believes policy-makers have got things badly wrong and his explanation for how this has happened reads something like this: take a credible theory; record a temperature rise that excites scientists; set up a United Nations body to look into the matter; build some computer models with flawed assumptions that generate projections of runaway temperatures; stoke these fears with the help of a largely uncritical media and a vibrant environmental movement; and, finally, add some politicians who see ‘saving the planet’ as the ultimate cause célêbre.

Lawson recently fleshed out his thinking in a lecture in Bath, which the GWPF circulated this month. As a distinguished politician, he has had plenty of bad-tempered exchanges with political opponents but none have been so bitter as  those over climate change. “I have never in my life experienced the extremes of personal hostility, vituperation and vilification which I – along with other dissenters, of course – have received for my views on global warming and global warming policies.”

After a recent appearance on the BBC, many listeners complained to the broadcaster that Lawson was unqualified to speak on the topic because he wasn’t a climate scientist. “I must admit I am strongly tempted to agree with that... on the clear understanding, of course, that everyone else plays by the same rules. No more statements by Ed Davey, or indeed any other politician, including Ed Miliband, Lord Deben [John Gummer] and Al Gore. Nothing more from the Prince of Wales, or from Lord Stern. What bliss!”

But Lawson said he and other non-scientists had every right to speak about the topic because, ultimately, it was not a scientific one. “The issue is not climate change but climate change alarmism. And alarmism is a feature not of the physical world, but of human behaviour.

“There is, indeed, an accepted scientific theory – the greenhouse effect – which I do not dispute and which, the alarmists claim, justifies their belief and their alarm,” he said. The effect of increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide was, however, highly uncertain. Temperature records suggest that mean global temperature increased by about 0.5ºC in the last quarter of the 20th century. “But since then, and wholly contrary to the expectations of the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, who confidently predicted that global warming would not merely continue but would accelerate, given the unprecedented growth in global carbon dioxide emissions, there has been no further warming at all.

“To be precise, the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a deeply flawed body whose non-scientist chairman is a committed climate alarmist, reckons that global warming has latterly been occurring at the rate of 0.05ºC per decade, plus or minus 0.1ºC. In other words, the observed rate of warming is less than the margin of error.”

Lawson said this showed that the computer models used by the climate science community to predict future dramatic temperature rises were “scarcely worth the computer code they are written in” and “almost certainly mistaken”. 

Evidence, what evidence? 

Some pundits have pointed to the floods that affected much of southern England this winter, caused by a shift in the jetstream, as evidence of man-made climate change. But Lawson was scathing. There was “no credible scientific theory that links this behaviour [the movement of the jetstream] to the fact that the earth’s surface is some 0.8C warmer than it was 150 years ago”.

“That has not stopped some climate scientists, such as the publicity-hungry chief scientist at the UK Met Office, Dame Julia Slingo, from telling the media that it is likely that ‘climate change’ (by which they mean warming) is partly to blame.”

Society was now much more sensitised to extreme weather events, he said, “partly because of sensitivity to the climate change doctrine, and partly simply as a result of the explosion of global communications”.  “It is perfectly true that many more people are affected by extreme weather events than ever before. But that is simply because of the great growth in world population.”

With temperature datasets suggesting there stable average global surface temperatures for 17 years, Lawson said adaptation, not mitigation, was the correct response to the possibility of warming resuming. “It clearly makes sense to make ourselves more resilient and robust in the face of extreme weather events, whether or not there is a slight increase in the frequency or severity of such events.

“Astonishingly, this is not the course on which our leaders in the Western world generally, and the UK in particular, have embarked. They have decided that what we must do, at inordinate cost, is prevent the possibility (as they see it) of any further warming by abandoning the use of fossil fuels.”

Lawson said there was “no way in which this could be remotely cost-effective”. Lord Stern’s 2006 report for the UK Government, The Economics of Climate Change, suggested otherwise but Lawson said it was “a bible for the economically illiterate”, full of “dodgy economics”, and had been “comprehensively demolished by the most distinguished economists on both sides of the Atlantic”.

Stern based his conclusions on weighing up the costs and benefits of action to cut emissions, but Lawson said other commentators ignored any economic assessment of the case for mitigation at all. These people urged dramatic reductions in fossil fuel use on the basis of the ‘precautionary principle’ – the possibility that failing to kerb emissions will have a catastrophic outcome.

This made no sense either, said Lawson. “A moment’s reflection would remind us that there are a number of possible catastrophes, many of them less unlikely than that caused by runaway warming… and there is no way we can afford the cost of unlimited spending to reduce the likelihood of all of them.”

Turning to the politics of cutting emissions, Lawson said there was “no chance” of a meaningful global agreement at the supposedly ‘crunch’ United Nations-sponsored conference in Paris next year. Developing countries such as China rightly saw fossil fuels as a vital way of delivering economic growth and lifting their populations out of poverty.

“We use fossil fuels not because we love them, or because we are in thrall to the multinational oil companies, but simply because they provide far and away the cheapest source of large-scale energy, and will continue to do so, no doubt not forever, but for the foreseeable future.”

The UK’s Climate Change Act was pointless. “There is little point in setting an example, at great cost, if no one is going to follow it. Around the world, governments are now gradually watering down or even abandoning their decarbonisation ambitions.”

So why, Lawson wondered, has Western society “succumbed to the self-harming collective madness that is climate change orthodoxy?”   “It is difficult to escape the conclusion that it has in effect become a substitute religion, attended by all the intolerant zealotry that has so often marred religion in the past, and in some places still does today.”

The two creeds that used to vie for popular support in the western world – Christianity and Communism – were in decline, “yet people still feel the need both for comfort and for the transcendent values that religion can provide”.

“It is the quasi-religion of green alarmism and global salvationism, of which the climate change dogma is the prime example, which has filled the vacuum, with reasoned questioning of its mantras regarded as little short of sacrilege.  Throughout the ages, something deep in man’s psyche has made him receptive to apocalyptic warnings that the end of the world is nigh.

“It is a cruel irony that, while it was science which, more than anything else, was able by its great achievements, to establish the age of reason, it is all too many climate scientists and their hangers-on who have become the high priests of a new age of unreason.”  

One page summary on climate change.

Be as clever as anyone on climate change here.

Calling people 'headless chickens' Chazza becomes one.

At the very least HRH Prince of Wales should now hear full presentations delivered by Lords Monckton and Lawson and their supporting scientists.

 

With credit to What's Up With That for the following:

 

 

 

Monckton: Challenge to Prince Charles

Posted on February 5, 2014 by Guest Blogger

Lord Monckton invites ‘Chazza’ to spar over ‘unroyal’ global-warming remark

His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales,
Clarence House, London.

Candlemas, 2014

Your Royal Highness’ recent remarks describing those who have scientific and economic reason to question the Establishment opinion on climatic apocalypse in uncomplimentary and unroyal terms as “headless chickens” mark the end of our constitutional monarchy and a return to the direct involvement of the Royal Family, in the Person of our future king, no less, in the cut and thrust of partisan politics.

Now that Your Royal Highness has offered Your Person as fair game in the shootout of politics, I am at last free to offer two options. I need no longer hold back, as so many have held back, as Your Royal Highness’ interventions in politics have become more frequent and less acceptable in their manner as well as in their matter.

Option 1. Your Royal Highness will renounce the Throne forthwith and for aye. Those remarks were rankly party-political and were calculated to offend those who still believe, as Your Royal Highness plainly does not, that the United Kingdom should be and remain a free country, where any subject of Her Majesty may study science and economics, may draw his conclusions from his research and may publish the results, however uncongenial the results may be.

The line has been crossed. No one who has intervened thus intemperately in politics may legitimately occupy the Throne. Your Royal Highness’ arrogant and derogatory dismissiveness towards the near-50 percent of your subjects who no longer follow the New Religion is tantamount to premature abdication. Goodnight, sweet prince. No more “Your Royal Highness.”

Hi, there, Chazza! You are a commoner now, just like most of Her Majesty’s subjects. You will find us a cheerfully undeferential lot. Most of us don’t live in palaces, and none of us goes everywhere with his own personalized set of monogrammed white leather lavatory seat covers.

The United Kingdom Independence Party, which until recently I had the honor to represent in Scotland, considers – on the best scientific and economic evidence – that the profiteers of doom are unjustifiably enriching themselves at our expense.

For instance, even the unspeakable Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has accepted advice from me and my fellow expert reviewers that reliance upon ill-constructed and defective computer models to predict climate was a mistake. Between the pre-final and final drafts of the “Fifth Assessment Report,” published late last year, the Panel ditched the models and substituted its own “expert assessment” that in the next 30 years the rate of warming will be half what the models predict.

In fact, the dithering old fossils in white lab coats with leaky Biros sticking out of the front pocket now think the rate of warming over the next 30 years could be less than in the past 30 years, notwithstanding an undiminished increase in the atmospheric concentration of plant food. Next time you talk to the plants, ask them whether they would like more CO2 in the air they breathe. Their answer will be Yes.

The learned journals of economics are near-unanimous in saying it is 10-100 times costlier to mitigate global warming today than to adapt to its supposedly adverse consequences the day after tomorrow.

Besides, in the realm that might have been yours there has been no change – none at all – in mean surface temperature for 25 full years. So if you are tempted to blame last year’s cold winter (which killed 31,000 before their time) or this year’s floods (partly caused by the Environment Agency’s mad policy of returning dozens of square miles of the Somerset Levels to the sea) on global warming, don’t.

You got your science and economics wrong. And you were rude as well. And you took sides in politics. Constitutionally, that’s a no-no. Thronewise, mate, you’ve blown it.

On the other hand, we Brits are sport-mad. So here is option 2. I am going to give you a sporting second chance, Charlie, baby.

You see, squire, you are no longer above politics. You’ve toppled off your gilded perch and now you’re in it up to your once-regal neck. So, to get you used to the idea of debating on equal terms with your fellow countrymen, I’m going to give you a once-in-a-reign opportunity to win back your Throne in a debate about the climate. The motion: “Global warming is a global crisis.” You say it is. I say it isn’t.

We’ll hold the debate at the Cambridge Union, for Cambridge is your alma mater and mine. You get to pick two supporting speakers and so do I. We can use PowerPoint graphs. The Grand Debate will be televised internationally over two commercial hours. We let the world vote by phone, before and after the debate. If the vote swings your way, you keep your Throne. Otherwise, see you down the pub.

Cheers, mate!

Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

 

Prince Charles clearly listens to the Luvvies & Greens

Prince Charles Vs Climate Sceptics - Again With The Deepest Respect, Charles, Please Do Shut Up  Prince Charles has attacked corporate lobbyists and climate change sceptics for turning the Earth into a "dying patient", making his most outspoken criticism yet of the world's failure to tackle global warming just when the heir to the throne is assuming a growing number of the duties of what is supposed to be an apolitical monarchy. Prince Charles's views were reinforced by Lord Stern, author of the 2006 report on the economics of climate change, who called sceptics and lobbyists "forces of darkness" who would be driven back. --Fiona Harvey, The Guardian, 9 May 2013 The prince's remarks were attacked by climate change sceptics and dismissed by several lobbyists. Benny Peiser, of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the thinktank founded by Lord Lawson, which takes a climate-sceptic stance, accused the prince of poisoning the debate on climate change with "apocalyptic language that a government minister would not use", and accused him of being happy for consumers to pay more in their energy bills for green policies. --Fiona Harvey, The Guardian, 9 May 2013 Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation - a climate-sceptic think tank set up by former Conservative chancellor Nigel Lawson - sharply criticised the prince. "He doesn't make himself popular by attacking half the British public, who are known to be sceptical." Dr Peiser said the heir to the throne should "have a conversation with his father", who he said had a different view. "It's not about the science," he said. "It's about the apocalyptic rhetoric that is poisoning the debate." --BBC News, 9 May 2013 In the fields of medicine, agriculture, architecture and energy production, the prince is taking positions that are intensely partisan; and some of these are areas in which decisions have monumental economic implications for every family in the land… The prince certainly needs someone to point out to him that the planet is not “dying” and that it was doing just fine when CO2 concentrations were vastly higher than they are now or are ever likely to be as a result of whatever amount of fossil fuels we burn. --Dominic Lawson, The Sunday Times, 12 May 2013   But no matter how much you and I agree, Prince Charles should have remained silent. Charles strays into areas of political dispute over what should be done [about global warming]. Charles's lack of judgment may explain why, though he will take over duties such as attending Commonwealth heads of government conferences, the Queen will not agree to either abdication or a regency. Charles is a dangerously divisive figure – not because he may destroy the monarchy (which I would welcome), but because he threatens an already fragile public confidence in democracy.  --Peter Wilby, The Guardian, 10 May 2013 The Prince of Wales has warned that mankind is on the brink of “committing suicide on a grand scale” unless urgent progress is made in tackling green issues such as carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, intensive farming and resource depletion. Adopting uncharacteristically apocalyptic language, the Prince said the world was heading towards a “terrifying point of no return” and that future generations faced an “unimaginable future” on a toxic planet. However Dr Benny Peiser, director of Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation, said the Prince’s views were still out of step with mainstream thinking. “He is really a good representative of the environmental movement as such and it is not a personal issue,” he said. But he added that the “extreme alarm and extreme concern” was “over the top and not helpful to the debate”. “It doesn’t convince any governments or any ministers and in the end it is over the top and won’t be heard.” --Jonathan Brown, The Independent 23 November 2012

Polar Bears are doing well

Global Warming Policy Foundation

1) Polar bears are a conservation success story
Their numbers have rebounded remarkably since 1973 and we can say for sure that there are more polar bears now than there were 40 years ago. Although we cannot state the precise amount that populations have increased (which is true for many species – counts are usually undertaken only after a major decline is noticeable), polar bears join a long list of other marine mammals whose populations rebounded spectacularly after unregulated hunting stopped: sea otters, all eight species of fur seals, walrus, both species of elephant seal, and whales of all kinds (including grey, right, bowhead, humpback, sei, fin, blue and sperm whales). Once surveys have been completed for the four sub-populations of polar bears whose numbers are currently listed as zero, the total world population will almost certainly rise to well above the current official estimate of 20,000-25,000 (perhaps to 27,000-32,000?).

2) The only polar bear subpopulation that has had a statistically significant decline in recent years is the one in Western Hudson Bay. A few others have been presumed to be decreasing, based on suspicions of over-harvest- of over-harvest of over-harvesting, assumed repercussions of reduced sea ice and/or statistically insignificant declines in body condition – not actual population declines.

3) Polar bears in the US portion of the Chukchi Sea are in good condition and reproducing well, while sea ice in the Bering Sea has rebounded from record lows over the last ten years – good reasons not to be worried about polar bears in the Chukchi.

4) A survey by the Nunavut government in 2011 showed that polar bear numbers in Western Hudson Bay have not declined since 2004 as predicted and all available evidence indicates that Hudson Bay sea ice is not on a steadily precipitous decline – good reasons not to be worried about Hudson Bay bears.

Full report

Dr Susan Crockford
Dr Susan Crockford is an evolutionary biologist and an expert on polar bear evolution. She has been working for 35 years in archaeozoology, paleozoology and forensic zoology and is an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. She is the author of Rhythms of Life: Thyroid Hormone and the Origin of Species.



Matt Ridley: We Should Be Listening To Susan Crockford
The Global Warming Policy Foundation, 13 March 2013

Foreword To Susan Crockford’s Ten Good Reasons Not To Worry About Polar Bears

In 1978 three friends and I spent six weeks camped in a valley in Spitsbergen. The possibility that we would meet a polar bear there, even in winter, let alone summer, was far-fetched and we slept soundly in our tents without taking any precautions. We used a nearby hut for shelter from the weather. Last year I enquired about using that hut again and was told that it was no longer habitable: ‘due to damages made by polar bears’.

The west coast of Spitsbergen is now thickly inhabited by bears in summer, as it was not then. In recent years they have killed all the eggs and goslings laid by barnacle geese on offshore islands: breeding success has been near zero. Something similar has been happening on Cooper Island off Alaska, where bears have predated black guillemot nests in recent years. In both cases, scientists are attempting to explain these changes in terms of bears being stranded on land by the loss of ice, but there never was summer sea ice (and rarely winter ice) on the west coast of Spitsbergen. Nobody with local experience is in any doubt that bear numbers have boomed in the region, thanks to the cessation of hunting in the 1970s, and that this rather than any change in ice cover locally is the chief reason for their more frequent encounters with bears. Yet the Polar Bear Specialist Group calls the trend in the Barents Sea bear sub-population ‘unknown’. Indeed, Dr. Susan Crockford has uncovered the astonishing fact that this entire population, which the Norwegian government has estimated as containing more than 2,000 animals, is officially listed as ‘data deficient’ on a new PBSG’s map, as is true for several Canadian ones that have also been counted.

The same organization claims that eight of the polar bear’s sub-populations are decreasing, but read its own website and you will find that this is based almost entirely on projections and mathematical models. The official data table and map says that two of these eight sub-populations are only ‘thought’ or ‘believed’ to be declining – entirely due to hunting; four are in decline only according to computer models, despite some claims by ‘traditional ecological knowledge’ (ie, locals) that they are thriving; one has more than doubled but is now said to be ‘currently declining’ because of crowding, not climate change; and only one showed a real decline. The latest data show that even that decline (in the West Hudson Bay population) has probably recently been reversed.

In other words, the claim that polar bear populations are declining at all, let alone due to climate change, is a manufactured myth, designed for media consumption and with

very little basis in fact. That it works all too well is demonstrated by an episode in 2011 involving Sir David Attenborough. In a television series the brilliant television presenter, unwisely diverging from neutral natural history, had asserted that the polar bear is already in trouble. When challenged by Lord Lawson that ‘the polar bear population has not been falling, but rising’, Sir David responded. He was quoted by The Daily Telegraph as saying ‘Most [polar bear populations] are in decline and just one is increasing – for a number of factors – one being they have stopped hunting…Lord Lawson is denying what the whole scientific community is accepting and working at and it is extraordinary thing for him to do’.

Much as I admire and like both men, I have to say that the evidence suggests that Lord Lawson’s account is closer to the truth. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature estimated in 1966 that there were 10,000 polar bears in the world; in 2006, the same source estimated that the population had risen to 20,000-25,000 bears. Had Sir David examined the text on the PBSG’s website he would have found that all but one of the eight sub-population declines he cited were in fact based on ‘beliefs’ or future projections. As demonstrated by another recent mistake in another television series, this time an exaggerated claim for temperature change in Africa, Sir David is not being well served by his BBC researchers these days.

Zac Unger documents in his recent book Never Look a Polar Bear in the Eye, how polar bear ‘decline’ is now a large and lucrative industry and in places like Churchill, Manitoba, organisations like Polar Bears International cynically use the imagined plight of the bears to raise money, and push propaganda at young people about changing their lifestyles and those of their parents.

We’re empowered to teach these kids how to make a difference. It’s an enormous responsibility. Saving the polar bear is in their hands,

an activist explains to Unger, having flown school children by helicopter to a bear-proof camp so they can emote by video-conference to schools across America. As Attenborough once said:

All these big issues need a mascot and that’s what the polar bear is.

Yet as Unger discovered and Susan Crockford confirms, increasingly the local people in places like Churchill look on the carnival of tourists, journalists and scientists with bemusement, knowing full well that even there – in one of the most southerly polar bear populations of all – the evidence of a decline in numbers, or of the health of the bears, is threadbare or non-existent. How much more threadbare that evidence is farther north, where the bears’ greatest problem is usually too much ice and therefore too few seals, is poorly known. The ideal habitat for polar bears is first-year ice that lasts well into summer, when they feed on fat young seals. The fact that this ice thins or breaks up enough to allow seals to feed during the autumn keeps the seal population healthy. Four to five months of ice-free fasting in early autumn is not exceptional for polar bears and two to three months is quite normal. The recent trend in most of the Arctic – no change in winter ice extent but a decline in late summer ice extent – has been towards exactly this ideal combination.

Many scientists have grown frustrated with the domination of the polar bear story by dogmatic propagandists and have begun to speak out. Susan Crockford is one of them: a zoologist who is independent of the alarm industry and therefore free to make up her own mind. In this valuable paper, she has done a fine job of documenting the actual facts of the case as far as they are known.

Matt Ridley

Global Warming Policy Foundation

 

So man made CO2 is tiny.

An important new paper published today in Global Biogeochemical Cycles finds
that "In contrast to recent claims, trends in the airborne fraction of
anthropogenic carbon [dioxide] cannot be detected when accounting for the
decadal-scale influence of explosive volcanism and related uncertainties." In
other words, after accounting for the large effect of volcanic eruptions, ENSO,
and other uncertainties upon natural CO2 sinks, trends in the man-made fraction
of atmospheric CO2 "cannot be detected." Thus, despite an exponential increase
in man-made CO2 emissions, there is no statistically significant trend in the
man-made fraction of CO2 in the atmosphere.
This further suggests that man is not the primary cause of the increase of CO2
in the atmosphere, that temperature is responsible for the increase in CO2
levels due to out-gassing. According to the authors, "Our results highlight the
importance of considering the role of natural variability in the carbon cycle
for interpretation of observations and for data-model intercomparison."

Note man-made emissions are only about 4% of the total CO2 emissions in the
atmosphere, and CO2 only represents about 0.04% of the entire atmosphere

Click source to read more and link
Source Link: hockeyschtick.blogspot.co.uk

Met Office says no warming.

Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. HOME WHO WE ARE LATEST POSTINGS GWPF REPORTS PRESS RELEASES VIDEOS CONTACT CCNet 07/01/13 Met Office Forecasts No Global Temperature Rise Global Warming Standstill May Last For 20 Years The UK Met Office has revised its global temperature predictions as a result of a new version of its climate model and climate simulations using it. It now believes that global temperatures up to 2017 will most likely be 0.43 deg C above the 1971 -2000 average, with an error of +/- 0.15 deg C. In reality this is a forecast of no increase in global temperatures above current levels. If the latest Met Office prediction is correct, and it accords far more closely with the observed data than previous predictions, then it will prove to be a lesson in humility. It will show that the previous predictions that were given so confidently as advice to the UK government and so unquestioningly accepted by the media, were wrong, and that the so-called sceptics who were derided for questioning them were actually on the right track. --David Whitehouse, The Global Warming Policy Foundation, 7 January 2013 I argue that the greenhouse effect does not seem to be as significant as suggested. I personally feel that the likelihood over the next century of greenhouse warming reaching magnitudes comparable to natural variability seems small. And I certainly feel that there is time and need for research before making major policy decisions. It seems to me that if science doesn’t have integrity, it isn’t of much use to people. --Richard Lindzen, MIT Talk, 27 September 1989 The stupidest international agreement since the Treaty of Versailles expired at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Fifteen years after its launch, the Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change died a miserable failure. Few are likely to mourn. In Britain, however, the Government remains wedded to a post-Kyoto strategy, and along with the rest of the EU has agreed to ‘extend’ the treaty’s provisions. British policy, enshrined in the current Energy Bill, is being driven not by evidence but by irrational dogma, and to question it is to be accused of endangering the planet. In reality, a disaster of a different kind looms: years of chronic impoverishment while competitors roar ahead and world CO2 emissions rise unchecked. Welcome to the British industrial counter-revolution. --David Rose, Mail on Sunday, 6 January 2013 Not that anyone has noticed, but the Kyoto Protocol expired on 31 December, with carbon emissions up by 58% over 1990 levels – instead the 5% cut the signatories envisaged. All that fuss for worse-than-nothing. Kyoto has not been replaced, because a new era of climate change rationalism is slowly taking root. As Nigel Lawson predicted, the hysteria of the last few years is cooling. There’s no point legislating for change that’s not going to happen. --Fraser Nelson, The Spectator, 6 January 2013 Did you know that the Earth is getting greener, quite literally? Satellites are now confirming that the amount of green vegetation on the planet has been increasing for three decades. This will be news to those accustomed to alarming tales about deforestation, overdevelopment and ecosystem destruction. --Matt Ridley, The Wall Street Journal, 5 January 2013 1) David Whitehouse: Met Office Forecasts No Global Temperature Rise - The Global Warming Policy Foundation, 7 January 2013 2) Richard Lindzen’s 23-Year Old Forecast - Fabius Maximus, 7 January 2013 3) David Rose: Welcome To The British Industrial Counter-Revolution - Mail on Sunday, 6 January 2013 4) How Oliver Letwin Lost His Kyoto Bet With Nigel Lawson - The Spectator, 6 January 2013 5) Matt Ridley: How Fossil Fuels Have Greened The Planet - The Wall Street Journal, 5 January 2013 6) And Finally: The Handy All Weather Is Extreme Climate Barometer - Josh 192 - Bishop Hill, 6 January 2013 1) David Whitehouse: Met Office Forecasts No Global Temperature Rise The Global Warming Policy Foundation, 7 January 2013 The UK Met Office has revised its global temperature predictions as a result of a new version of its climate model and climate simulations using it. It now believes that global temperatures up to 2017 will most likely be 0.43 deg C above the 1971 -2000 average, with an error of +/- 0.15 deg C. In reality this is a forecast of no increase in global temperatures above current levels. The new forecast produced by the UK Met Office for the next five years is a considerable change from forecasts given in the past few years. An excellent comparison between the new and older forecasts can be found here. It is worth comparing the current forecast with that made just five years ago. In 2007 The Met Office Hadley Centre reported to the UK Government that it had pioneered a new system to predict the climate a decade ahead. It said that the system simulated both the human-driven climate change and the evolution of slow natural variations already locked into the system. “We are now using the system to predict changes out to 2014. By the end of this period, the global average temperature is expected to have risen by around 0.3 °C compared to 2004, and half of the years after 2009 are predicted to be hotter than the current record hot year, 1998.” Given that we have data for three of the five years of that period and all show no departure from a constant temperature when analysed statistically, this is a prediction that will probably be totally wrong. In any case it is completely at odds with the new forecast. We were also told that the recent temperature standstill was unimportant and that the underlying rate of global temperature increase continued at a constant 0.2 deg C per decade. This, as we pointed out, is only true if one considered decadal averages. If one considers 5-year averages then one arrives at a very different conclusion. The new prediction challenges that assertion that the underlying rate of change of global warming is unchanged. According to the IPCC and the Met Office the unchanging 0.2 deg C underlying rate of global warming should have resulted in a 0.4 deg C rise in global temperature between 1997 -2017. That this has not happened is because of a global cooling offset that has precisely kept pace with the greenhouse gas forcing that wants to raise the Earth’s temperature every year. We have pointed out that this equivalence of the warming and cooling factors, and their associated feedbacks, is not just an average but also a year on year balancing act. This behaviour is scientifically suspicious. That the global temperature standstill (observed from 1997 to the present) could continue to at least 2017 would mean a 20-year period of no statistically significant change in global temperatures. Such a period of no increase coming at a time when greenhouse gas forcing is rising will pose fundamental problems for climate models. If the latest Met Office prediction is correct, and it accords far more closely with the observed data than previous predictions, then it will prove to be a lesson in humility. It will show that the previous predictions that were given so confidently as advice to the UK government and so unquestioningly accepted by the media, were wrong, and that the so-called sceptics who were derided for questioning them were actually on the right track. Feedback: mailto:david.whitehouse@thegwpf.org 2) Richard Lindzen’s 23-Year Old Forecast Fabius Maximus, 7 January 2013 We’ve looked at plenty of false (or at least temporarily not proven) forecasts by American experts about wars and climate. The rule seems to be that political correctness is rewarded, irrespective of accuracy. Today we look at a speech made 23 years ago by a MIT professor. It looks good today, still accurate despite the advances in climate science. Furthermore his forecast of no warming larger than natural variability during the next century has proven accurate so far — after 23 years have elapsed. (1) Contempt for science One of the great oddities of the debate about climate science is the contempt for scientists displayed by the lay cheerleaders on both sides. Scientists are authorities, unless they disagree with the true dogma — then they’re fools and charlatans. Previous posts looked at forecasts that have proved false, or not correct so far. Today we look at a speech made 23 years ago by a MIT professor. It looks good today, still accurate despite the advances in climate science. Furthermore his forecast of no warming larger than natural variability during the next century has proven accurate so far — after 23 years have elapsed. Speech by Richard Lindzen In M.I.T. Tech Talk of 27 September 1989 Eugene F. Mallove describes a presentation by Richard Lindzen (Prof of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, MIT) to an audience of 250 scientists at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Colloquium. (a) Key Points “I argue that the greenhouse effect does not seem to be as significant as suggested.” “I personally feel that the likelihood over the next century of greenhouse warming reaching magnitudes comparable to natural variability seems small.” “And I certainly feel that there is time and need for research before making major policy decisions.” The science of global warming is “a region in which the uncertainty is vast.” “The trouble with many of these {temperature} records is that the corrections are of the order of the effects, and most of us know that when we’re in that boat we need a long series and great care to derive a meaningful signal.” (b) About the natural variability of climate “Climate inherently has a natural variability that is often attributed to possible variations in solar output, volcanic dust, etc. The point we have to keep in mind is that without any of this at all our climate would wander — at least within limits. The reason is that we don’t have a closed system. “Even if the Sun’s output were fixed, even if the radiative input were absolutely constant, even if there were no change in the absorbing gases, the ocean itself can take up and store heat and release it. It has a stable layer that normally does not communicate with lower levels, but every so often there is upwelling that suddenly presents the atmosphere and the surface world with an erratic energy source.” (c) About Water “Water is terrifically absorptive. We see the bumps [in the absorption spectrum] from CO2 and ozone and methane only because they occur in a window of the water vapor absorption spectrum. Water vapor is far and away the most important greenhouse gas, except for one form which isn’t a greenhouse gas: clouds. Clouds themselves as liquid water are as important to the infrared budget as water vapor. Both swamp by orders of magnitude all the others. With CO2 one is talking about three watts per square meter at most, compared to a hundred or more watts per square meter for water. “… Upper level humidity — especially above 5 kilometers–is rather important and the models are lousy at handling this. In the models, most warming comes from the increase in water that accompanies the warming. Whether such an increase in water vapor above 5 kilometers actually accompanies warming is doubtful. “We don’t know how to calculate cloudiness. Some studies have found that the dominant radiative effect of clouds is cooling. Only a few percent change in cloud cover will more than swamp the estimated CO2 effect, he suggested. In the current models, for reasons that puzzle almost everyone, the cloud feedbacks are positive rather than negative. That is, they increase the temperature. “There are other tricky things that no one has explored. One example: the feedback through albedo — the reflectivity of the Earth such as can be affected by snow cover. In the models this feedback is positive, but it could as well be negative in certain ranges of temperature. On the planet the most wonderful constituent is water with its remarkable thermodynamic properties. It’s the obvious candidate for the thermostat of our system, and yet in most of these models, all water-related feedbacks are positive. I don’t think we would have existed if that were true.” (d) About political use of science Comparing the greenhouse warming debate to an earlier controversy, in his 1988 book Infinite in All Directions Freeman Dyson (Wikipedia bio) wrote: As a scientist I want to rip the theory of nuclear winter apart, but as a human being I want to believe it. This is one of the rare instances of a genuine conflict between the demands of science and the demands of humanity. As a scientist, I judge the nuclear winter theory to be a sloppy piece of work, full of gaps and unjustified assumptions. As a human being, I hope fervently that it is right. Here is a real and uncomfortable dilemma. What does a scientist do when science and humanity pull in opposite directions? Lindzen said about this: “It seems to me that if science doesn’t have integrity, it isn’t of much use to people.” Full story 3) David Rose: Welcome To The British Industrial Counter-Revolution Mail on Sunday, 6 January 2013 The stupidest international agreement since the Treaty of Versailles expired at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Fifteen years after its launch, the Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change died a miserable failure. Few are likely to mourn. According to Kyoto’s authors, it should by now have triggered a five per cent fall in the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. In fact, they have risen by 58 per cent because the world’s faster-growing economies never ratified Kyoto at all, nor the drastic cuts in the use of fossil fuel it prescribed. China, America, Brazil and India simply ignored it, while Canada, New Zealand and Russia, although initially committed, later cast it aside. In Britain, however, the Government remains wedded to a post-Kyoto strategy, and along with the rest of the EU has agreed to ‘extend’ the treaty’s provisions. One consequence of this is the new Energy Bill, which by 2020 will triple the subsidies paid by taxpayers and consumers to ‘renewable’ energy suppliers to £7.6 billion a year. The bungs paid to operate offshore wind turbines – the most expensive form of energy ever devised – will rise 16-fold to an annual £4.2 billion. The hated onshore turbines will also get huge new subsidies, at least doubling their number to about 6,500. Even this underestimates the Bill’s full burden, which is closer to £110 billion. Among its enormous further costs are those which will be incurred by the inconvenient fact that wind turbines make electricity for only a third of the time. Replacing coal or ageing nuclear stations with wind requires new back-up capacity powered by gas at the same time – though this itself will be uneconomic because when the wind is blowing it will have to be switched off. Meanwhile, as Oxford University’s Professor Dieter Helm points out in his recent book, The Carbon Crunch, Britain’s claim to stand as a shining example of emissions rectitude is bogus. Yes, the UK’s own production of CO2 fell by 15 per cent between 1990 and 2005, but this was achieved only by exporting British industries to countries such as China, where on average two new power stations fuelled by coal – by far the dirtiest type – come on stream each week. Taking this into account, writes Prof Helm, means the emissions caused by UK economic activity rose by 19 per cent. It doesn’t matter whether one is a global warming sceptic, or an alarmist: considered either as an effective means of cutting world CO2 emissions, or as a way to restart growth, Britain’s energy strategy is self-defeating. And however much subsidy existing renewable technology gets, it will never be enough. [....] British policy, enshrined in the current Bill, is being driven not by evidence but by irrational dogma, and to question it is to be accused of endangering the planet. Only this explains the ferocity of opposition to fracking. In reality, a disaster of a different kind looms: years of chronic impoverishment while competitors roar ahead and world CO2 emissions rise unchecked. Welcome to the British industrial counter-revolution. Full story 4) How Oliver Letwin Lost His Kyoto Bet With Nigel Lawson The Spectator, 6 January 2013 Fraser Nelson “Shall I send a cheque to the House of Lords?” Letwin asked Lawson Not that anyone has noticed, but the Kyoto Protocol expired on 31 December, with carbon emissions up by 58% over 1990 levels – instead the 5% cut the signatories envisaged. All that fuss for worse-than-nothing. Kyoto has not been replaced, because a new era of climate change rationalism is slowly taking root. As Nigel Lawson predicted, the hysteria of the last few years is cooling. There’s no point legislating for change that’s not going to happen. No point taxing the poor out of the sky (or off the roads) if it won’t make the blindest bit of difference to the trajectory of global warming. To be sure, countries responsible for 15pc of emissions have signed an extension of Kyoto. But the main players have drawn a veil over this rather hysterical chapter in the great energy debate. Even David Cameron has gone cold on warming. In 2006, the Prime Minister captured the mood with his husky dog trip to Svalbard and advised people to “vote blue and go green”. Nigel Lawson, ex-editor of The Spectator, told Cameron’s policy chief Oliver Letwin that this mania would pass – and, crucially, that Kyoto would expire without any successor. In his column in this week’s magazine, Martin Vander Weyer reveals a conversation he had with Lord Lawson over Christmas where the ex-Chancellor revealed that he:- …bet Oliver Letwin — now David Cameron’s policy co-ordinator — that the Kyoto Protocol on carbon reduction would reach its expiry date on 31 December 2012 without a substantial successor treaty being signed to enforce binding cutbacks in emissions. ‘There has been no new agreement, let alone a “substantial” one,’ declares Lawson, brandishing an email from Letwin that concludes: ‘Shall I send a cheque to the House of Lords?’ The irony is that the rich countries are anyway modifying their behaviour, as greener shale gas becomes more widely available. As we said in the leading article of the Christmas double issue: While the rich world’s economies grew by 6 per cent over the last seven years, fossil fuel consumption in those countries fell by 4 per cent. This remarkable (and, again, unreported) achievement has nothing to do with green taxes or wind farms. It is down to consumer demand for more efficient cars and factories. So there is no more talk from the government about “leading a new green revolution in Britain.” Instead we have the much more sensible Osborne doctrine, revealed in the 2011 Tory conference. The central tenet is very clear:- “Let’s at the very least resolve that we’re going to cut our carbon emissions no slower but also no faster than our fellow countries in Europe.” Under the Climate Change Act, as it is currently structured, the government is legally bound to cut Britain’s carbon emissions by 34 per cent by the end of this decade. The rest of the EU, on the other hand, has only committed to 20 per cent. So the Climate Change Act needs revision. Kyoto shows that all this pious summitry succeeds in nothing more than raising new taxes (which usually hit the poorest hardest). America shows that new technology and greater efficiency is the best way of dealing with the energy problem. It may pain the environmentalists to admit it, but fracking may yet do more to stem carbon emissions than Kyoto ever did. 5) Matt Ridley: How Fossil Fuels Have Greened The Planet The Wall Street Journal, 5 January 2013 Did you know that the Earth is getting greener, quite literally? Satellites are now confirming that the amount of green vegetation on the planet has been increasing for three decades. This will be news to those accustomed to alarming tales about deforestation, overdevelopment and ecosystem destruction. This possibility was first suspected in 1985 by Charles Keeling, the scientist whose meticulous record of the content of the air atop Mauna Loa in Hawaii first alerted the world to the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Mr. Keeling’s famous curve showed not only a year-by-year increase in carbon dioxide levels but a season-by-season oscillation in the concentration. John S. Dykes Satellites show that the amount of green vegetation has been increasing or three decades straight. During summers in the Northern Hemisphere, the Earth breathes in carbon dioxide as green plants (most of which are north of the equator) absorb the gas and turn it into carbohydrate. In the northern winter, the Earth breathes the gas out again, as the summer’s leaves rot. Mr. Keeling and colleagues noticed that the depth of the breathing had increased in Hawaii by 20% since the 1960s: The Earth was taking in more carbon dioxide each northern summer and giving out more each winter. Since the inhalation is done by green leaves, they reasoned, the amount of greenery on the planet must be growing larger. In the 1980s forest biologists started to report striking increases in the growth rates of trees and the density of forests: in Douglas firs in British Columbia, Scots pines in Finland, bristlecone pines in Colorado and even tropical rain forests. Around the same time, a NASA scientist named Compton Tucker found that he could map global vegetation changes by calculating a “Normalized Difference Vegetation Index” (NDVI) from the data produced by a satellite sensor. The data confirmed Mr. Keeling’s suspicion: Greenery was on the increase. At first, this was thought to be a northern phenomenon, caused by faster growth in the great spruce and birch forests of Siberia and Canada, but the satellites showed it was happening all over the world and especially strongly in the Amazon and African rain forests. Using the NDVI, one team this year reported that “over the last few decades of the 20th century, terrestrial ecosystems acted as net carbon sinks,” i.e., they absorbed more carbon than they were emitting, and “net greening was reported in all biomes,” though the effect had slowed down in recent years. The latest and most detailed satellite data, which is yet to be published but was summarized in an online lecture last July by Ranga Myneni of Boston University, confirms that the greening of the Earth has now been going on for 30 years. Between 1982 and 2011, 20.5% of the world’s vegetated area got greener, while just 3% grew browner; the rest showed no change. What explains this trend? Man-made nitrogen fertilizer causes crops to grow faster, but it is having little effect on forests. There are essentially two possibilities: climate and carbon dioxide itself. Warmer, wetter weather should cause more vegetation to grow. But even without warming, an increase in carbon dioxide should itself accelerate growth rates of plants. CO2 is a scarce resource that plants have trouble scavenging from the air, and plants grow faster with higher levels of CO2 to inhale. Dr. Myneni reckons that it is now possible to distinguish between these two effects in the satellite data, and he concludes that 50% is due to “relaxation of climate constraints,” i.e., warming or rainfall, and roughly 50% is due to carbon dioxide fertilization itself. In practice, the two interact. A series of experiments has found that plants tolerate heat better when CO2 levels are higher. The inescapable if unfashionable conclusion is that the human use of fossil fuels has been causing the greening of the planet in three separate ways: first, by displacing firewood as a fuel; second, by warming the climate; and third, by raising carbon dioxide levels, which raise plant growth rates. 6) And Finally: The Handy All Weather Is Extreme Climate Barometer - Josh 192 Bishop Hill, 6 January 2013 Follow on Twitter Forward to Friend Copyright © 2013 Global Warming Policy Foundation, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted into it with your subscription to the GWPF or through CCNet. Our mailing address is: Global Warming Policy Foundation 1 Carlton House Terrace Westminster, London SW1Y 5DB United Kingdom Add us to your address book unsubscribe from this list update subscription preferences