Britain’s Royal Society Defies the Green Blob

Posted on by Ron Clutz

News comes from Financial Times that the prestigious scientific Royal Society is honoring it’s motto:  “Take Nobody’s Word For It” (translation of Latin phrase above.) Of course, a great many UK academics were outraged at the refusal to take for granted their claim that “Climate Science is Settled.” The article by Kenza Bryan is Royal Society and academics clash over influence of oil and gas industry.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Three-centuries-old institution rebuffs call to
declare fossil fuel companies culpable for global warming

A clash between Britain’s 363-year-old Royal Society and more than 2,000 UK academics has escalated over the national academy of scientists’ refusal to attribute the role of oil and gas companies in climate change.

The academics had expressed their concerns about the influence of fossil fuel companies on scientific research in a letter last year to the Royal Society, founded in 1660 as a fellowship that included the likes of Isaac Newton.

But the Royal Society has now rebuffed their request to issue an “unambiguous statement about the culpability of the fossil fuel industry in driving the climate crisis”.

Treasurer Jonathan Keating wrote in reply last week that it would “not be appropriate” to do so, as there was a need for “multiple actors” to engage with the complexity of the climate crisis.

The academics’ concerns about the influence of oil and gas companies extend to separate allegations that ties to BP were not disclosed by a Cambridge professor in a Royal Society policy briefing document produced by a working group that he chaired in 2022.

Professor Andy Woods held the title of head of the BP Institute, a research arm that it funds, which was renamed the Institute for Energy and Environmental Flows by Cambridge last year. He also has the formal title of BP professor, a position endowed by the oil and gas company. These affiliations were not included in the reference in the document.

The Royal Society briefing document called for an “enormous and continued investment” into geological carbon capture and storage, a technology promoted by the fossil fuel industry as a way to keep expanding while storing the emissions.

A CO₂ storage adviser to BP and a director for CO₂ storage at the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate also contributed to the report. Woods’s expertise in geophysical fluid flows and the BP affiliation are listed elsewhere by the Royal Society in its fellowship directory. BP and Woods did not respond to a request for comment. The Royal Society said the document gave “clear affiliations” for contributors and that it publishes a wide range of research.

The tensions reflect the discord in academia about funding or
participation in research by oil and gas companies, as well as
rising activism on campuses among the student body and staff.

The Royal Society’s decision not to call out the industry was described as “moral cowardice” by James Dyke, earth system science professor at Exeter university.

Another signatory to the original letter, Bill McGuire, professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, said it was “mind-boggling” that a respected scientific organisation would not attribute the role of fossil fuel groups in climate change.

Student campaigners at Oxford university have also targeted the author of a set of green principles used by the university to help guide decisions on whether to invest in or receive grants from oil and gas companies.

Under freedom of information provisions, the student campaigners identified Myles Allen, the university’s head of atmospheric, oceanic and planetary physics, as having had 18 meetings where a representative was present from one of the major oil and gas groups, including either BP, Shell, Exxon or Equinor.

Those meetings in 2021 and 2022 included five occasions organised by Shell, three of which focused on the oil and gas group’s strategy and climate scenarios, according to the freedom of information response.

Allen, who was head of the Oxford Net Zero research initiative until earlier this year, told the Financial Times he had used the meetings to highlight the need for fossil fuel companies to pay for carbon capture and storage technologies.

It is a solution to the reduction of future carbon dioxide emissions that he has long advocated. “We all have a duty to help the fossil fuel industry not make the problem worse but to fix it,” he said.

Oxford said its “partnerships and collaborations with industry” allow for research on pressing global issues, including climate-related ones.

The campaigners called on Oxford to conduct an independent assessment about its approach to fossil fuel sector donations and investment. Cambridge university in March temporarily stopped accepting grants and donations from the sector in response to similar concerns.

 

Science In General

Where Are Pro-Palestinian Protests Heading?

Quote | Posted on by Ron Clutz

Mark Steyn knows something about this movement and provides his usual cutting analysis of what is going on.  The article at his blog is The Three Rs, well worth reading.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Does anyone still talk about the Three Rs in education? That would be reading, writing and racism …whoops, my mistake, ‘rithmetic.

It isn’t difficult. Every weekend, my inbox fills up with readers demanding to know what I think about this or that news story, but in the end all the news stories are the same. Just from the last couple of days:

~At McGill University in Montreal, cute young predominantly female students in masks and keffiyehs take over the campus to demand “intifada until victory”;

~At the University of Texas in Austin, a comedian attempts to point out to members of Trans 4 Palestine the internal contradictions of the rainbow coalition, and for his pains gets beaten up;

~At Châteauroux in central France, fifteen-year-old Mathis Marchais is stabbed to death by an Afghan “migrant” known to the gendarmes for two previous stabbings earlier this year but loosed on the public by an indulgent judge just last Monday;

~In Hamburg, over a thousand protesters march through the streets calling for an Islamic caliphate in Germany.

The Three Rs: Read the Writing on the wall – and do the ‘Rithmetic. Like I said, it’s not difficult – although it seems to be for some of the willing dupes who brought us the western world’s new reality.

They belong to the “Official Jews” for whom mass Muslim immigration is less of a threat than those awkward types who point out the obvious consequences of mass Muslim immigration. The “Official Jews” are not confined to Canada: America is awash with them, as is the United Kingdom. And unless, as Kathy Shaidle used to say, they’re “too stupid to be Jewish” what’s happening cannot have come as a surprise. Me a zillion years ago:

Young Muslims do not like Jews: that is a simple fact, and it’s a waste of everybody’s time denying it. Where Muslims predominate, Jews vanish – as in Molenbeek, across the canal from downtown Brussels. I remember from my childhood the main drag, the Chaussée de Gand (or Steenweg op Gent, if you’re Flemish, as my mum was), as a bustling strip with many Jewish businesses. But in the first decade of the 21st century they all disappeared, and their former owners chose to remain silent – because it was easier that way.

And thus the seeming paradox of the post-war era – that, as a certain “niche Canadian” has been saying for years, the principal beneficiary of western Holocaust guilt was Islam. The Canadian Islamic Congress and America’s ADL and their European equivalents did not choose merely “to remain silent”: they enthusiastically welcomed it, and did their best to crush those who disagreed.

This isn’t about Jews, except insofar as they are presently
at the sharp end of a convulsive cultural shift.

About six months after 9/11, I took a little trip to Western Europe and the Middle East and, waiting for a friend in Vienna, I noticed that everybody going in and out of the maternity shop across the street appeared to be Muslim. That’s just anecdote, as the bien pensants who dismissed my book as “alarmist” like to say. But two decades on it’s borne out by statistics. Back then, Muslims made up of four per cent of Austria’s population; now it’s over eight per cent. Me, again years ago, from the expanded e-book edition of Mark Steyn’s Passing Parade:

According to the Vienna Institute of Demography, by mid-century a majority of Austrians under fifteen will be Muslim. This is a country that not so long ago was ninety percent Catholic. But “not so long ago” is another country:

Salzburg, 1938, singing nuns, Julie Andrews — “How do you solve a problem like Maria?”

Salzburg, 2038: How do you solve a problem like sharia?

“Eight per cent” doesn’t sound like a lot. But, in western societies of elderly native populations, they skew young, and make up an ever larger percentage of your youth – close to a majority in certain European cities. Jews, on the other hand, are old. So, for those cutesy coeds, young Muslims are all around and young Jews are very thin on the ground.

The salient feature of the demonstrations roiling McGill, Columbia and
other western campuses is not that the pasty blonde trustiefundies are
“pro-Palestinian” but that they’re cool with being culturally Islamic.

Oh, to be sure, it’s mostly just keffiyehs and a few other fashion accessories; not yet full body bags and clitoridectomies. But why wouldn’t it have a purchase on them that Mr Housefather’s bleatings about how everyone should feel safe do not? The young want to belong, and what they most want to belong to is the future – and they grasp instinctively where the future’s headed.

They also get that these guys mean it. It is not coincidental that white upscale females are now among the most enthusiastic proponents of Hamas. For two generations, their menfolk have made the mistake of believing all that What Women Want bollocks, and the result is legions of “new males”, metrosexuals, soyboys – or, alternatively, depressive methheads chugging back Bud Light down in the man-cave. Me again: “We have made a world of men that women don’t want and women that men don’t want, and that doesn’t seem likely to end well.”

And suddenly there’s Ahmed and Shahid doing their Sheik of Araby Xtreme Sports routine:

At night when you’re asleep
Into your tent I’ll creep.

Whatever the respective charms of abortion or same-sex marriage, both are a biological dead-end. So, more obliquely, is the interminable prolongation of education and the impact of mass immigration on affordable housing. All four lead to later – and smaller – family formation. So men and women who would have been twenty-seven-year-old suburban dads and mums are now on the frontlines at McGill picking out their keffiyehs. Throw in open borders – and, as the icing on the cake, encourage your middle-school girls to prioritise “gender identity” and thereby render themselves infertile.

So the fertility-rate comeback that David Frum predicted almost two decades ago failed to materialise. Indeed, all that has happened since then is that America has joined Europe in the demographic death-spiral.

Two decades back, there was still time to change course. Instead, the governments of the west doubled down on the madness, and today averting the inevitable requires measures they have no stomach for.  Yet, even as their parents drone on with their multiculti bromides, our youth get the reality: Queers 4 Palestine may be a delusion, but not as insane a delusion as “diversity is our strength”.

It’s not difficult: Do the math.

Footnote:  Maybe We Get a Break from Climate Crisis Parades

The shift by activists could be a silver lining that pivots from the climate issue.  Will Jones writes at Daily Sceptic Have Left-Wing Protesters Moved On From Climate Change? Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Climate protests are so last year, it appears, as the same crowd now preoccupies itself with Gaza demonstrations. Is the truth that Left-wing protests are just fads chasing the latest issue du jour? The Telegraph‘s Ross Clark thinks so.

It’s hard not to notice a distinct switch in the targets of Lefty protesters over the past few months. They seem to have lost interest in protesting about climate change and have switched to Palestine and asylum-seekers instead.

The shift can be dated to last November during a protest held in Amsterdam, when Greta Thunberg suddenly seemed to decide that the planet was no longer worthy of her complete attention. She told the crowd that there “can be no climate justice on occupied land”, before blathering on about Palestine. It didn’t please one of her fans, who stormed the stage and seized her microphone, but as ever with Greta she seemed to manage to set a trend.

In the months since we have seen fewer and fewer climate protests as progressive mobs find other things to work themselves up about instead. Never mind that we are supposedly heading for climate Armageddon if we don’t abandon all oil and gas more or less instantly, a more urgent injustice seems to be that asylum seekers are being taken out of three star hotels and housed on a barge instead – a barge which, by the way, seemed to be perfectly adequate in its previous incarnation as accommodation for oil workers (although I guess in the minds of climate activists they needed to be punished).

“Like most Left-wing causes,” Ross suggests, climate change was “just a passing fad”. “The same crowd seems to have evolved seamlessly from anti-globalisation to the Occupy movement, to climate change and now to Palestine.”

Don’t forget BLM!

“If you want to be on trend with your protesting, better opportunities now lie elsewhere,” Ross concludes

Newsflash: Science Not Settled on How Water Freezes

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Here’s a great short video for those who like to think science is settled on global warming/climate change, as only one example of hubris despite our limited understanding of natural phenomena.  Further on is a discussion of the climate system we see as chaotic, another way of saying its behavior surpasses our understanding.

Readers here will know that I report frequently on the changes in Arctic ice extents during the year. So I was impressed to learn about fundamental mysteries underlying even this ordinary process. We do know a lot about the phase change of liquid water into ice.  And we have a theoretical law that is predictable, but only when water is absolutely pure, i.e. only H2O with no gases or impurities dissolved in the sample.  As the researcher explains, almost all of the water in nature has impurities and thus parts of the process are still beyond our scientific knowledge.

Our Chaotic Climate System

h/t tom0mason for inspiring this post, including his comment below

Foucault’s pendulum in the Panthéon, Paris

The Pendulum is Settled Science

I attended North Phoenix High School (Go Mustangs!) where students took their required physics class from a wild and crazy guy. Decades later alumni who don’t remember his name still reminisce about “the crazy science teacher with the bowling ball.”

To demonstrate the law of conservation of energy, he required each and every student to stand on a ladder in one corner of the classroom. Attached to a hook in the center of the rather high ceiling was a rope with a bowling ball on the other end. The student held the ball to his/her nose and then released it, being careful to hold still afterwards.

The 16 pound ball traveled majestically diagonally across the room and equally impressively returned along the same path. The proof of concept was established when the ball stopped before hitting your nose (though not by much).  In those days we learned to trust science and didn’t need to go out marching to signal some abstract virtue.

The equations for pendulums are centuries old and can predict the position of the ball at any point in time based on the mass of the object, length of the rope and starting position.

Pictured above is the currently operating Foucault pendulum that exactly follows these equations. While it had long been known that the Earth rotates, the introduction of the Foucault pendulum in 1851 was the first simple proof of planetary rotation in an easy-to-see experiment. Today, Foucault pendulums are popular displays in science museums and universities.

What About the Double Pendulum?

Trajectories of a double pendulum

A comment by tom0mason at alerted me to the science demonstrated by the double compound pendulum, that is, a second pendulum attached to the ball of the first one. It consists entirely of two simple objects functioning as pendulums, only now each is influenced by the behavior of the other.

Lo and behold, you observe that a double pendulum in motion produces chaotic behavior. In a remarkable achievement, complex equations have been developed that can and do predict the positions of the two balls over time, so in fact the movements are not truly chaotic, but with considerable effort can be determined. The equations and descriptions are at Wikipedia Double Pendulum

Long exposure of double pendulum exhibiting chaotic motion (tracked with an LED)

But here is the kicker, as described in tomomason’s comment:

If you arrive to observe the double pendulum at an arbitrary time after the motion has started from an unknown condition (unknown height, initial force, etc) you will be very taxed mathematically to predict where in space the pendulum will move to next, on a second to second basis. Indeed it would take considerable time and many iterative calculations (preferably on a super-computer) to be able to perform this feat. And all this on a very basic system of known elementary mechanics.

And What about the Climate?

This is a simple example of chaotic motion and its unpredictability. How predictable is our climate with so many variables and feedbacks, some known some unknown? Consider that this planet’s weather/climate system is chaotic in nature with many thousands (millions?) of loosely coupled variables and dependencies, and many of these variables have very complex feedback features within them.

Hurricane Gladys, photographed from orbit by Apollo 7 in 1968 (Photo: NASA)

Summary

To quote the IPCC:

The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. Rather the focus must be upon the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions.

A recent National Review article draws the implications:
The range of predicted future warming is enormous — apocalyptism is unwarranted.

But as the IPCC emphasizes, the range for future projections remains enormous. The central question is “climate sensitivity” — the amount of warming that accompanies a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As of its Fifth Assessment Report in 2013, the IPCC could estimate only that this sensitivity is somewhere between 1.5 and 4.5°C. Nor is science narrowing that range. The 2013 assessment actually widened it on the low end, from a 2.0–4.5°C range in the prior assessment. And remember, for any specific level of warming, forecasts vary widely on the subsequent environmental and economic implications.

For now, though, navigating the climate debate will require translating the phrase “climate denier” to mean “anyone unsympathetic to the most aggressive activists’ claims.” This apparently includes anyone who acknowledges meaningful uncertainty in climate models, adopts a less-than-catastrophic outlook about the consequences of future warming, or opposes any facet of the activist policy agenda. The activists will be identifiable as the small group continuing to shout “Denier!” The “deniers” will be identifiable as everyone else.

Climate System Summation

Esteemed climate scientist Richard Lindzen ends a very fine recent presentation (here) with this description of the climate system:

I haven’t spent much time on the details of the science, but there is one thing that should spark skepticism in any intelligent reader. The system we are looking at consists in two turbulent fluids interacting with each other. They are on a rotating planet that is differentially heated by the sun. A vital constituent of the atmospheric component is water in the liquid, solid and vapor phases, and the changes in phase have vast energetic ramifications. The energy budget of this system involves the absorption and reemission of about 200 watts per square meter. Doubling CO2 involves a 2% perturbation to this budget. So do minor changes in clouds and other features, and such changes are common. In this complex multifactor system, what is the likelihood of the climate (which, itself, consists in many variables and not just globally averaged temperature anomaly) is controlled by this 2% perturbation in a single variable? Believing this is pretty close to believing in magic. Instead, you are told that it is believing in ‘science.’ Such a claim should be a tip-off that something is amiss. After all, science is a mode of inquiry rather than a belief structure.

Flow Diagram for Climate Modeling, Showing Feedback Loops

Climatism Substitutes for Solving Problems

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Cambridge professor Mike Hulme explains in an interview with Daily Mail Why climate change ISN’T going to end the world and why we need to stop obsessing about net-zero.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.  H\T John Ray

Young people are terrified that climate change will destroy Earth by the time they grow up, but the world is not actually ending, argues Cambridge professor Mike Hulme.

Humanity is not teetering on a cliff’s edge, he says,
at risk of imminent catastrophe if we don’t reach
net-zero carbon emissions by a certain date.

And he has made it his mission to call out the people who claim we are. In his most recent book, Climate Change Isn’t Everything, Hulme argued that belief in the urgent fight against climate change has shot far past the territory of science and become an ideology.

Hulme, a professor of human geography at the University of Cambridge, dubs this ideology ‘climatism,’ and he argues that it can distort the way society approaches the world’s ills, placing too much focus on slowing Earth from warming.

The problem, he said, is this narrow focus takes attention away from
other important moral, ethical, and political objectives –
like helping people in the developing world rise out of poverty.

DailyMail.com spoke with Hulme about why he thinks climatism is a problem, how it should be balanced out, and what keeps him hopeful about the future of humanity.

As with other ‘isms’ – like cubism or romanticism – ideologies provide a way of thinking about things, explained Hulme.  ‘They’re like spectacles that help us to make sense of the world, according to a predefined framework or structure,’ he said

To be clear, Hulme does not claim that all ideologies are wrong.  ‘We all need ideologies, and we all have them – whether you’re a Marxist or a nationalist, you’re likely to hold an ideology of some form or other,’ he added.

As Hulme sees it, many journalists, advocates, and casual observers of climate change have become devotees of climatism, inaccurately attributing many events that happen in the world as being caused by climate change.

He gives the examples of a fire, flood, or damaging hurricane.  ‘No matter how complex a particular causal chain might be, it’s a very convenient shorthand to say, ‘Oh, well, this was caused by climate change,” Hulme said.

‘It’s a very shallow and simplistic way, I would argue,
to try to describe events that are happening in the world.’

Researchers have shown that warming oceans do lead to more frequent and more severe storms: Twice as many cyclones now become category 4 or 5 as they did in the 1970s, scientists have found, and Atlantic storms are three times as likely to become hurricanes.

Hulme doesn’t argue that the effects of climate change are not happening, though, just that stopping climate change won’t stop disasters from happening altogether.

‘Fundamentally, we’re going to have to deal with hurricanes, and
we’re not going to deal with them just by cutting our carbon emissions.’ 

The solutions, he argues, will include better forecasting, better early warning systems, better emergency plans, and better infrastructure.  ‘There are all sorts of things that we can do to minimize the risks and dangers of hurricanes, that are way more effective in the short term than trying to cut our carbon emissions,’ said Hulme.

The danger of climatism, he pointed out, is that it leads people down a false chain of events: If all of these things happening in the world are caused by climate change, then all we have to do is stop climate change, and all the other things will stop themselves.

‘And that clearly is a very inadequate way of thinking about the complexities of most of the problems we we face in the world today.’  This distorted thinking can make people forget about other important concerns, he argues.

As an example, Hulme points to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): 17 areas that the world’s governments have identified as top priorities for humanity.  The SDGs include building peace and justice, eradicating poverty, reducing child mortality, and ensuring clean sanitation and water for billions of people on the planet.

If society were to put climate change priorities into their proper proportions then, Hulme said it would still be on the list.  It just wouldn’t be the only item on the list, and it wouldn’t be at the top.  ‘There’s 17 SDGs, and two of them are related to climate. So that begins to rebalance, or re-proportion, the amount of effort and attention we might wish to pay,’ said Hulme.

Beyond these mixed up priorities, Hulme also takes issue with what he sees as an obsession with deadlines: ‘There’s this idea of the ticking clock counting down to Ground Zero – we’ve only got five years, 10 years, two years – however long different commentators put the deadline.’

Doomsday was predicted but failed to happen at midnight.

Hulme disputed the idea that he is over-egging the pudding on climatism – after all, the whole basis of his argument is that climatists are the ones making a bigger deal out of it than they should be.  ‘I’ve been observing concerns about how climate change is talked about, framed, and reacted to in public for many, many years.’  And this public framing has led to a phenomenon called ‘eco-anxiety,’ which Hulme said he sees among his students at Cambridge University

‘They have absorbed these claims of tipping points, and they take these things literally, and feel that there is no future for them because the climate is going to go out of control,’ he said. ‘They feel that it will be too late, and everything will collapse.’

See Also Climate Delusional Disorder

Climate Delusional Disorder (CDD) 2021 Update

Ocean Cooling Continues March 2024

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The best context for understanding decadal temperature changes comes from the world’s sea surface temperatures (SST), for several reasons:

  • The ocean covers 71% of the globe and drives average temperatures;
  • SSTs have a constant water content, (unlike air temperatures), so give a better reading of heat content variations;
  • Major El Ninos have been the dominant climate feature in recent years.

HadSST is generally regarded as the best of the global SST data sets, and so the temperature story here comes from that source. Previously I used HadSST3 for these reports, but Hadley Centre has made HadSST4 the priority, and v.3 will no longer be updated.  HadSST4 is the same as v.3, except that the older data from ship water intake was re-estimated to be generally lower temperatures than shown in v.3.  The effect is that v.4 has lower average anomalies for the baseline period 1961-1990, thereby showing higher current anomalies than v.3. This analysis concerns more recent time periods and depends on very similar differentials as those from v.3 despite higher absolute anomaly values in v.4.  More on what distinguishes HadSST3 and 4 from other SST products at the end. The user guide for HadSST4 is here.

The Current Context

The chart below shows SST monthly anomalies as reported in HadSST4 starting in 2015 through March 2024.  A global cooling pattern is seen clearly in the Tropics since its peak in 2016, joined by NH and SH cycling downward since 2016.

Note that in 2015-2016 the Tropics and SH peaked in between two summer NH spikes.  That pattern repeated in 2019-2020 with a lesser Tropics peak and SH bump, but with higher NH spikes. By end of 2020, cooler SSTs in all regions took the Global anomaly well below the mean for this period.  

Then in 2022, another strong NH summer spike peaked in August, but this time both the Tropic and SH were countervailing, resulting in only slight Global warming, later receding to the mean.   Oct./Nov. temps dropped  in NH and the Tropics took the Global anomaly below the average for this period. After an uptick in December, temps in January 2023 dropped everywhere, strongest in NH, with the Global anomaly further below the mean since 2015.

Then came El Nino as shown by the upward spike in the Tropics since January, the anomaly nearly tripling from 0.38C to 1.09C.  In September 2023, all regions rose, especially NH up from 0.70C to 1.41C, pulling up the global anomaly to a new high for this period. By December, NH cooled to 1.1C and the Global anomaly down to 0.94C from its peak of 1.10C, despite slight warming in SH and Tropics.

Then in January both Tropics and SH rose, resulting Global Anomaly going higher. Tropics anomaly reached a new peak of 1.29C. and all ocean regions were higher than 01/2016, the previous peak. Now in February and March all regions have cooled bringing the Global anomaly back down 0.18C from its September peak.

Comment:

The climatists have seized on this unusual warming as proof their Zero Carbon agenda is needed, without addressing how impossible it would be for CO2 warming the air to raise ocean temperatures.  It is the ocean that warms the air, not the other way around.  Recently Steven Koonin had this to say about the phonomenon confirmed in the graph above:

El Nino is a phenomenon in the climate system that happens once every four or five years.  Heat builds up in the equatorial Pacific to the west of Indonesia and so on.  Then when enough of it builds up it surges across the Pacific and changes the currents and the winds.  As it surges toward South America it was discovered and named in the 19th century  It is well understood at this point that the phenomenon has nothing to do with CO2.

Now people talk about changes in that phenomena as a result of CO2 but it’s there in the climate system already and when it happens it influences weather all over the world.   We feel it when it gets rainier in Southern California for example.  So for the last 3 years we have been in the opposite of an El Nino, a La Nina, part of the reason people think the West Coast has been in drought.

It has now shifted in the last months to an El Nino condition that warms the globe and is thought to contribute to this Spike we have seen. But there are other contributions as well.  One of the most surprising ones is that back in January of 2022 an enormous underwater volcano went off in Tonga and it put up a lot of water vapor into the upper atmosphere. It increased the upper atmosphere of water vapor by about 10 percent, and that’s a warming effect, and it may be that is contributing to why the spike is so high.

A longer view of SSTs

The graph above is noisy, but the density is needed to see the seasonal patterns in the oceanic fluctuations.  Previous posts focused on the rise and fall of the last El Nino starting in 2015.  This post adds a longer view, encompassing the significant 1998 El Nino and since.  The color schemes are retained for Global, Tropics, NH and SH anomalies.  Despite the longer time frame, I have kept the monthly data (rather than yearly averages) because of interesting shifts between January and July. 1995 is a reasonable (ENSO neutral) starting point prior to the first El Nino. 

The sharp Tropical rise peaking in 1998 is dominant in the record, starting Jan. ’97 to pull up SSTs uniformly before returning to the same level Jan. ’99. There were strong cool periods before and after the 1998 El Nino event. Then SSTs in all regions returned to the mean in 2001-2. 

SSTS fluctuate around the mean until 2007, when another, smaller ENSO event occurs. There is cooling 2007-8,  a lower peak warming in 2009-10, following by cooling in 2011-12.  Again SSTs are average 2013-14.

Now a different pattern appears.  The Tropics cooled sharply to Jan 11, then rise steadily for 4 years to Jan 15, at which point the most recent major El Nino takes off.  But this time in contrast to ’97-’99, the Northern Hemisphere produces peaks every summer pulling up the Global average.  In fact, these NH peaks appear every July starting in 2003, growing stronger to produce 3 massive highs in 2014, 15 and 16.  NH July 2017 was only slightly lower, and a fifth NH peak still lower in Sept. 2018.

The highest summer NH peaks came in 2019 and 2020, only this time the Tropics and SH were offsetting rather adding to the warming. (Note: these are high anomalies on top of the highest absolute temps in the NH.)  Since 2014 SH has played a moderating role, offsetting the NH warming pulses. After September 2020 temps dropped off down until February 2021.  In 2021-22 there were again summer NH spikes, but in 2022 moderated first by cooling Tropics and SH SSTs, then in October to January 2023 by deeper cooling in NH and Tropics.  

Then in 2023 the Tropics flipped from below to well above average, while NH produced a summer peak extending into September higher than any previous year.  Despite El Nino driving the Tropics January 2024 anomaly higher than 1998 and 2016 peaks, the last two months cooled in all regions, especially the Tropics, suggesting that the peak likely has been reached.

What to make of all this? The patterns suggest that in addition to El Ninos in the Pacific driving the Tropic SSTs, something else is going on in the NH.  The obvious culprit is the North Atlantic, since I have seen this sort of pulsing before.  After reading some papers by David Dilley, I confirmed his observation of Atlantic pulses into the Arctic every 8 to 10 years.

Contemporary AMO Observations

Through January 2023 I depended on the Kaplan AMO Index (not smoothed, not detrended) for N. Atlantic observations. But it is no longer being updated, and NOAA says they don’t know its future.  So I find that ERSSTv5 AMO dataset has data through October.  It differs from Kaplan, which reported average absolute temps measured in N. Atlantic.  “ERSST5 AMO  follows Trenberth and Shea (2006) proposal to use the NA region EQ-60°N, 0°-80°W and subtract the global rise of SST 60°S-60°N to obtain a measure of the internal variability, arguing that the effect of external forcing on the North Atlantic should be similar to the effect on the other oceans.”  So the values represent sst anomaly differences between the N. Atlantic and the Global ocean.

 

The chart above confirms what Kaplan also showed.  As August is the hottest month for the N. Atlantic, its varibility, high and low, drives the annual results for this basin.  Note also the peaks in 2010, lows after 2014, and a rise in 2021. Now in 2023 the peak was holding at 1.4C before declining.  An annual chart below is informative:

Note the difference between blue/green years, beige/brown, and purple/red years.  2010, 2021, 2022 all peaked strongly in August or September.  1998 and 2007 were mildly warm.  2016 and 2018 were matching or cooler than the global average.  2023 started out slightly warm, then rose steadily to an  extraordinary peak in July.  August to October were only slightly lower, but by December cooled by ~0.4C. January 2024 was unchanged from the previous month, but February anomaly rose 0.1C and March a little more to reach 1.2C anomaly.

The pattern suggests the ocean may be demonstrating a stairstep pattern like that we have also seen in HadCRUT4. 

The purple line is the average anomaly 1980-1996 inclusive, value 0.18.  The orange line the average 1980-202306, value 0.38, also for the period 1997-2012. The red line is 2013-202306, value 0.64. As noted above, these rising stages are driven by the combined warming in the Tropics and NH, including both Pacific and Atlantic basins.

See Also:

2024 El Nino Collapsing

Curiosity:  Solar Coincidence?

The news about our current solar cycle 25 is that the solar activity is hitting peak numbers now and higher  than expected 1-2 years in the future.  As livescience put it:  Solar maximum could hit us harder and sooner than we thought. How dangerous will the sun’s chaotic peak be?  Some charts from spaceweatherlive look familar to these sea surface temperature charts.

Summary

The oceans are driving the warming this century.  SSTs took a step up with the 1998 El Nino and have stayed there with help from the North Atlantic, and more recently the Pacific northern “Blob.”  The ocean surfaces are releasing a lot of energy, warming the air, but eventually will have a cooling effect.  The decline after 1937 was rapid by comparison, so one wonders: How long can the oceans keep this up? And is the sun adding forcing to this process?

Space weather impacts the ionosphere in this animation. Credits: NASA/GSFC/CIL/Krystofer Kim

Footnote: Why Rely on HadSST4

HadSST is distinguished from other SST products because HadCRU (Hadley Climatic Research Unit) does not engage in SST interpolation, i.e. infilling estimated anomalies into grid cells lacking sufficient sampling in a given month. From reading the documentation and from queries to Met Office, this is their procedure.

HadSST4 imports data from gridcells containing ocean, excluding land cells. From past records, they have calculated daily and monthly average readings for each grid cell for the period 1961 to 1990. Those temperatures form the baseline from which anomalies are calculated.

In a given month, each gridcell with sufficient sampling is averaged for the month and then the baseline value for that cell and that month is subtracted, resulting in the monthly anomaly for that cell. All cells with monthly anomalies are averaged to produce global, hemispheric and tropical anomalies for the month, based on the cells in those locations. For example, Tropics averages include ocean grid cells lying between latitudes 20N and 20S.

Gridcells lacking sufficient sampling that month are left out of the averaging, and the uncertainty from such missing data is estimated. IMO that is more reasonable than inventing data to infill. And it seems that the Global Drifter Array displayed in the top image is providing more uniform coverage of the oceans than in the past.

uss-pearl-harbor-deploys-global-drifter-buoys-in-pacific-ocean

USS Pearl Harbor deploys Global Drifter Buoys in Pacific Ocean

 

 

May Day: Appeals Court Rules Against Kids’ Climate Lawsuit

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Update May 1, 2024

Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals grants Federal government’s petition for writ of mandamus in the case of Juliana v. United States, originally filed in 2015.  Ruling excerpts are below in italics with my bolds. 20240501_docket-24-684_order

In the underlying case, twenty-one plaintiffs (the Juliana plaintiffs) claim that—by failing to adequately respond to the threat of climate change—the government has violated a putative “right to a stable climate system that can sustain human life.” Juliana v. United States, No. 6:15-CV-01517-AA, 2023 WL 9023339, at *1 (D. Or. Dec. 29, 2023). In a prior appeal, we held that the Juliana plaintiffs lack Article III standing to bring such a claim. Juliana v. United States, 947 F.3d 1159, 1175 (9th Cir. 2020). We remanded with instructions to dismiss on that basis. Id. The district court nevertheless allowed amendment, and the government again moved to dismiss. The district court denied that motion, and the government petitioned for mandamus seeking to enforce our earlier mandate. We have jurisdiction to consider the petition. See 28 U.S.C. § 1651. We grant it.

In the prior appeal, we held that declaratory relief was “not substantially likely to mitigate the plaintiffs’ asserted concrete injuries.” Juliana, 947 F.3d at 1170. To the contrary, it would do nothing “absent further court action,” which we held was unavailable. Id. We then clearly explained that Article III courts could not “step into the[] shoes” of the political branches to provide the relief the Juliana plaintiffs sought. Id. at 1175. Because neither the request for declaratory relief nor the request for injunctive relief was justiciable, we “remand[ed] th[e] case to the district court with instructions to dismiss for lack of Article III standing.” Id. Our mandate was to dismiss.

The district court gave two reasons for allowing amendment. First, it concluded that amendment was not expressly precluded. Second, it held that intervening authority compelled a different result. We reject each.
The first reason fails because we “remand[ed] . . . with instructions to dismiss for lack of Article III standing.” Id. Neither the mandate’s letter nor its spirit left room for amendment. See Pit River Tribe, 615 F.3d at 1079.
The second reason the district court identified was that, in its view, there was an intervening change in the law. District courts are not bound by a mandate when a subsequently decided case changes the law. In re Molasky, 843 F.3d 1179, 1184 n.5 (9th Cir. 2016). The case the court identified was Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski, which “ask[ed] whether an award of nominal damages by itself can redress a past injury.” 141 S. Ct. 792, 796 (2021). Thus, Uzuegbunam was a damages case which says nothing about the redressability of declaratory judgments. Damages are a form of retrospective relief. Buckhannon Bd. & Care Home v. W. Va. Dep’t of Health & Human Res., 532 U.S. 598, 608–09 (2001). Declaratory relief is prospective. The Juliana plaintiffs do not seek damages but seek only prospective relief. Nothing in Uzuegbunam changed the law with respect to prospective relief.

We held that the Juliana plaintiffs lack standing to bring their claims and told the district court to dismiss. Uzuegbunam did not change that. The district court is instructed to dismiss the case forthwith for lack of Article III standing, without leave to amend.

Background July 2023: Finally, a Legal Rebuttal on the Merits of Kids’ Climate Lawsuit

As reported last month, the Oregon activist judge invited the plaintiffs in Juliana vs US to reopen that case even after the Ninth Circuit shot it down.  Now we have a complete and thorough Motion from the defendant (US government) to dismiss this newest amended complaint.  Most interesting is the section under the heading starting on page 30.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Plaintiffs’ Claims Fail on the Merits

Because Plaintiffs’ action fails at the jurisdictional threshold, the Ninth Circuit never reached—and this Court need not reach—the merits of the claims. . . Plaintiffs’ second amended complaint, which supersedes the first amended complaint, asserts the same claims that were brought in the first amended complaint, which this Court addressed in orders that the Ninth Circuit reversed. Defendants thus renew their objection that Plaintiffs’ claims fail on the merits and should be dismissed pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(6).

A. There is no constitutional right to a stable climate system.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly instructed courts considering novel due process claims
to “‘exercise the utmost care whenever . . . asked to break new ground in this field,’… lest the liberty protected by the Due Process Clause be subtly transformed” into judicial policy preferences. More specifically, the Supreme Court has “regularly observed that the Due Process Clause specially protects those fundamental rights and liberties which are, objectively, ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.’”  Plaintiffs’ request that this Court recognize an implied fundamental right to a stable climate system contradicts that directive, because such a purported right is without basis in the Nation’s history or tradition.

The proposed right to a “stable climate system” is nothing like any fundamental right ever recognized by the Supreme Court. The state of the climate is a public and generalized issue, and so interests in the climate are unlike the particularized personal liberty or personal privacy interests of individuals the Supreme Court has previously recognized as being protected by fundamental rights.  “[W]henever federal courts have faced assertions of fundamental rights to a ‘healthful environment’ or to freedom from harmful contaminants, they have invariably rejected those claims.”. Plaintiffs’ First Claim for Relief must be dismissed.

B.  Plaintiffs fail to allege a cognizable state-created danger claim.

The First Claim for Relief must also be dismissed because the Constitution does not impose an affirmative duty to protect individuals, and Plaintiffs have failed to allege a cognizable claim under the “state-created danger” exception to that rule.
As a general matter:

[The Due Process Clause] is phrased as a limitation on the State’s power to act, not as a guarantee of certain minimal levels of safety and security. It forbids the State itself to deprive individuals of life, liberty, or property without “due process of law,” but its language cannot fairly be extended to impose an affirmative obligation on the State to ensure that those interests do not come to harm through other means.

Thus, the Due Process Clause imposes no duty on the government to protect persons from harm inflicted by third parties that would violate due process if inflicted by the government.

Plaintiffs contend that the government’s “deliberate actions” and “deliberate indifference” with regard to the dangers of climate change amount to a due process violation under the state-created danger exception.

First, Plaintiffs have identified no harms to their “personal security or bodily integrity” of the kind and immediacy that qualify for the state-created danger exception. . . But here, Plaintiffs allege that general degradation of the global climate has harmed their “dignity, including their capacity to provide for their basic human needs, safely raise families, practice their religious and spiritual beliefs, [and] maintain their bodily integrity” and has prevented them from “lead[ing] lives with access to clean air, water, shelter, and food.”  Those types of harm are unlike the immediate, direct, physical, and personal harms at issue in the above-cited cases.

Second, Plaintiffs identify no specific government actions—much less government actors—that put them in such danger. Instead, Plaintiffs contend that a number of (mostly unspecified) agency actions and inactions spanning the last several decades have exposed them to harm. This allegation of slowly-recognized, long-incubating, and generalized harm by itself conclusively distinguishes their claim from all other state-created danger cases recognized by the Ninth Circuit.

Third, Plaintiffs do not allege that government actions endangered Plaintiffs in particular. . . As explained above, Plaintiffs’ asserted injuries arise from a diffuse, global phenomenon that affects every other person in their communities, in the United States, and throughout the world.

For all these reasons, there is no basis for finding a violation of Plaintiffs’ due process right under the state-created danger doctrine, and Plaintiffs’ corresponding claim must be dismissed.

C. No federal public trust doctrine creates a right to a stable climate system.

Plaintiffs’ Fourth Claim for Relief, asserting public trust claims, should be dismissed for two independent reasons. First, any public trust doctrine is a creature of state law that applies narrowly and exclusively to particular types of state-owned property not at issue here. That doctrine has no application to federal property, the use and management of which is entrusted exclusively to Congress. . .Consequently, there is no basis for Plaintiffs’ public trust claim against the federal government under federal law.

Second, the “climate system” or atmosphere is not within any conceivable federal public trust.

1. No public trust doctrine binds the federal government.

Plaintiffs rely on an asserted public trust doctrine for the proposition that the federal government must “take affirmative steps to protect” “our country’s life-sustaining climate system,” which they assert the government holds in trust for their benefit.  But because any public trust doctrine is a matter of state law only, public trust claims may not be asserted against the federal government under federal law. . . The Supreme Court has without exception treated public trust doctrine as a matter of state law with no basis in the United States Constitution.

2. Any public trust doctrine would not apply to the “climate system” or the atmosphere.

Independently, any asserted public trust doctrine does not help Plaintiffs here. Public trust cases have historically involved state ownership of specific types of natural resources, usually limited to submerged and submersible lands, tidelands, and waterways. . . The climate system or atmosphere is unlike any resource previously deemed subject to a public trust. It cannot be owned and, due to its ephemeral nature, cannot remain within the jurisdiction of any single government. No court has held that the climate system or atmosphere is protected by a public trust doctrine. Indeed, the concept has been widely rejected.

For all these reasons, the Court should dismiss Plaintiffs’ Fourth Claim for Relief.

Background Post Update on Zombie Kids Climate Lawsuits: (Juliana vs. US) (Held vs Montana)

April 2024 Arctic Ice Seesaw

Posted on by Ron Clutz

In April, most of the Arctic ocean basins are still frozen over, and so the melting of ice extent begins in the marginal regions.   According to MASIE, April on average loses 1.1M km2, and this month it was 1.4M. However, April 2024 started well above average, slipped into deficit and ended up above normal. The few basins where open water appears this time of year tend to fluctuate and alternate waxing and waning, which appears as a see saw pattern in these images.

On the left is the Pacific seesaw with Bering below and Okhotsk above.  This year Okhotsk melted out rapidly, and at the end held only 181k km2, 14% of its March maximum.  Meanwhile Bering waffled up and down and retained ~60% (444k km2) of its max ice at the end. The Atlantic seesaw is Barents top center and Baffin on the right below Greenland.  Barents also waffled but lost no ice extent until the last week, ending up with 666k km2 (76% of its max). Baffin fluctuated before ending down to 1.06M (72% of its. max.).

While the bulk of the Arctic is frozen solid, the melting has started with the seesaws tilting back and forth in the four regions noted above.  The graph below shows the April patterns for ice extents on average, this year and some other years of note.

The graph shows the 18-year average loss for April is 1.1M km2.  2024 started with 236k km2 surplus ice extent and ended 44k km2 above average.  SII showed lower extents the first half, and greater extents the latter half, ending with a small surplus to MASIE.  Other recent years have been nearly average, while 2006 ended with a large deficit.

Region 2024121 Day 121 Ave 2024-Ave. 2006121 2024-2006
 (0) Northern_Hemisphere 13498263 13454328 43935 13037927 460336
 (1) Beaufort_Sea 1070983 1068053 2931 1067609 3374
 (2) Chukchi_Sea 965784 956102 9682 965302 483
 (3) East_Siberian_Sea 1087137 1085711 1426 1083591 3546
 (4) Laptev_Sea 897845 890453 7392 896455 1390
 (5) Kara_Sea 930744 909660 21084 911941 18803
 (6) Barents_Sea 666436 539906 126530 366229 300207
 (7) Greenland_Sea 790758 648904 141854 533678 257079
 (8) Baffin_Bay_Gulf_of_St._Lawrence 1060935 1195567 -134633 1037524 23411
 (9) Canadian_Archipelago 854860 849541 5320 843395 11465
 (10) Hudson_Bay 1242383 1236594 5789 1178518 63865
 (11) Central_Arctic 3232686 3231036 1651 3098989 133698
 (12) Bering_Sea 495771 459644 36127 639162 -143391
 (13) Baltic_Sea 19703 44493 -24791 29017 -9314
 (14) Sea_of_Okhotsk 180662 610735 -430073 381798 -201136

The table shows regional ice extents in km2.  Note the huge deficit in Okhotsk and a smaller deficit in Baffin.  Everywhere else is in surplus, especially the seas of Barents, Greenland and Bering.  2006 had 460k km2 less ice extent (nearly half a Wadham) than 2024.

The polar bears had a Valentine Day’s wish for Arctic Ice.

welovearcticicefinal

And Arctic Ice loves them back, returning every year so the bears can roam and hunt for seals.

Footnote:

Seesaw accurately describes Arctic ice in another sense:  The ice we see now is not the same ice we saw previously.  It is better to think of the Arctic as an ice blender than as an ice cap, explained in the post The Great Arctic Ice Exchange.

2024 To Be the Hottest Ever? Hold On!

Posted on by Ron Clutz

For sure you’ve seen the headlines declaring 2024 likely to be the Hottest year ever.  If you’re like me, your response is: That’s not the way it’s going down where I live.  Fortunately there is a website that allows anyone to check their personal experience with the weather station data nearby.  weatherspark.com provides data summaries for you to judge what’s going on in weather history where you live.  In my case a modern weather station is a few miles away  April 2024 Weather History at Montréal–Mirabel International Airport.  The story about April 2024 is evident below in charts and graphs from this site.  There’s a map that allows you to find your locale.

First, consider above the norms for April from the period 1980 to 2016.

Then, there’s April 2024 compared to the normal observations.

The graph shows April had some warm days, some cool days and overall was pretty normal.  But since climate is more than temperature, consider cloudiness.

Woah!  Most of the month was cloudy, which in spring means blocking the warming sun from hitting the surface.   And with all those clouds, let’s look at precipitation:

So, a major snowstorm April 3-4, 12 days when it rained, including heavy rain, and a couple of thunderstorms.  Given what we know about the hydrology cycles, that means a lot of heat removed upward from the surface.

So the implications for April temperatures in my locale.

There you have it before your eyes. Mostly Cool, Cold and
Very Cold, with freezing on numerous mornings.
Only five days with a few hours of comfortable temperatures.

Summary:

Claims of hottest this or that month or year are based on averages of averages of temperatures, which in principle is an intrinsic quality and distinctive to a locale.  The claim involves selecting some places and time periods where warming appears, while ignoring other places where it has been cooling.

Remember:  They want you to panic.  Before doing so, check out what the data says in your neck of the woods.  For example, NOAA declared that March 2024 was “Earth’s Warmest March on Record.”

 

 

Wake Up: Energy Transition Not Happening

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Wind and Solar The Grand Illusion

Mark Mills explains the many ways the deck is stacked against those gambling on Wind and Solar energy to replace hydrocarbon fuels.  The transcript is below in italics with my bolds and added images.

Have you ever heard of “unobtanium”?

It’s the magical energy mineral found on the planet Pandora in the movie, Avatar. It’s a fantasy in a science fiction script. But environmentalists think they’ve found it here on earth in the form of wind and solar power.

They think all the energy we need can be supplied by building enough wind and solar farms; and enough batteries.

The simple truth is that we can’t. Nor should we want to—not if our goal is to be good stewards of the planet.

To understand why, consider some simple physics
realities that aren’t being talked about.

All sources of energy have limits that can’t be exceeded. The maximum rate at which the sun’s photons can be converted to electrons is about 33%. Our best solar technology is at 26% efficiency. For wind, the maximum capture is 60%. Our best machines are at 45%.

So, we’re pretty close to wind and solar limits. Despite PR claims about big gains coming, there just aren’t any possible. And wind and solar only work when the wind blows and the sun shines. But we need energy all the time. The solution we’re told is to use batteries.

Again, physics and chemistry make this very hard to do.

Consider the world’s biggest battery factory, the one Tesla built in Nevada. It would take 500 years for that factory to make enough batteries to store just one day’s worth of America’s electricity needs. This helps explain why wind and solar currently still supply less than 3% of the world’s energy, after 20 years and billions of dollars in subsidies.

Putting aside the economics, if your motive is to protect the environment, you might want to rethink wind, solar, and batteries because, like all machines, they’re built from nonrenewable materials.

Consider some sobering numbers:

A single electric-car battery weighs about half a ton. Fabricating one requires digging up, moving, and processing more than 250 tons of earth somewhere on the planet.

Building a single 100 Megawatt wind farm, which can power 75,000 homes requires some 30,000 tons of iron ore and 50,000 tons of concrete, as well as 900 tons of non-recyclable plastics for the huge blades. To get the same power from solar, the amount of cement, steel, and glass needed is 150% greater.

Then there are the other minerals needed, including elements known as rare earth metals. With current plans, the world will need an incredible 200 to 2,000 percent increase in mining for elements such as cobalt, lithium, and dysprosium, to name just a few.

Where’s all this stuff going to come from? Massive new mining operations. Almost none of it in America, some imported from places hostile to America, and some in places we all want to protect.

Australia’s Institute for a Sustainable Future cautions that a global “gold” rush for energy materials will take miners into “…remote wilderness areas [that] have maintained high biodiversity because they haven’t yet been disturbed.”

And who is doing the mining? Let’s just say that they’re not all going to be union workers with union protections.

Amnesty International paints a disturbing picture: “The… marketing of state-of-the-art technologies are a stark contrast to the children carrying bags of rocks.”

And then the mining itself requires massive amounts of conventional energy, as do the energy-intensive industrial processes needed to refine the materials and then build the wind, solar, and battery hardware.

Then there’s the waste. Wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries have a relatively short life; about twenty years. Conventional energy machines, like gas turbines, last twice as long.

With current plans, the International Renewable Energy Agency calculates that by 2050, the disposal of worn-out solar panels will constitute over double the tonnage of all of today’s global plastic waste. Worn-out wind turbines and batteries will add millions of tons more waste. It will be a whole new environmental challenge.

Before we launch history’s biggest increase in mining, dig up millions of acres in pristine areas, encourage childhood labor, and create epic waste problems, we might want to reconsider our almost inexhaustible supply of hydrocarbons—the fuels that make our marvelous modern world possible.

And technology is making it easier to acquire and cleaner to use them every day.

It would take a wind farm the size of Albany county NY to replace the now closed Indian Point nuclear power plant.

The following comparisons are typical—and instructive:

It costs about the same to drill one oil well as it does to build one giant wind turbine. And while that turbine generates the energy equivalent of about one barrel of oil per hour, the oil rig produces 10 barrels per hour. It costs less than 50 cents to store a barrel of oil or its equivalent in natural gas. But you need $200 worth of batteries to hold the energy contained in one oil barrel.

Next time someone tells you that wind, solar and batteries are
the magical solution for all our energy needs ask them
if they have an idea of the cost… to the environment.

“Unobtanium” works fine in the movies. But we don’t live in movies. We live in the real world.

I’m Mark Mills, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, for Prager University.

There is no charge for content on this site, nor for subscribers to receive email notifications of postings.

The Herd Shuns Climate Lunatics

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Charles MacKay: “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

Conrad Black writes at National Post Washing away the climate lunatics.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

I have written here and elsewhere countless times before of the dangers of responding prematurely to alarmist concerns about climate change. Dr. Benny Peiser of the British Global Warming Policy Foundation spoke to the Friends of Science Society in Calgary earlier this month, warning that Europe’s extremist net zero carbon emission policies may get to Canada even though they are now running into extreme problems in Europe. The North American media has not much reported on the widespread and often violent farmer protests in Europe, which has caused every government that has been put to the test to scale back their aggressive climate change policies.

Tractors stand on a street during a protest by Belgian farmers over price pressures, taxes and green regulation, on the day of an EU agriculture ministers’ meeting in Brussels, Belgium March 26, 2024. REUTERS/Yves Herman/File Photo

For a long time, it was a political free lunch: everybody loves the environment, and the climate change issue was very skillfully transformed by the left into an assault on the capitalist system from a new angle in the name of saving the planet. As long as the heavy costs of displacing fossil fuels by so-called renewable energy were carefully disguised and diffused, everybody could wallow in collective self-praise for doing the healthy and environmentally responsible thing.

The burden of subsidized wind and solar farms didn’t appear on peoples’ energy bills, though eventually they were placed on the back of the taxpayer. Now, however, net zero policies are directly eating into the earnings and savings of the public and in most of Europe, the taxpayer rebellion is exploding, and the advantages of democracy are being reaffirmed as elected governments scamper to the rear, explaining that there has been a misunderstanding. When the German government tried to compel the people of that country to change their gas boilers for heat pumps at a cost of thousands of dollars per home, what critics called “boilergeddon,” it produced a so-called green-lash.

Another political disaster has befallen the western European governments that had rolled over like poodles in front of the climate change alarmists: once they had fully committed themselves to the boondoggle of electric vehicles (EV’s), and forced the powerful automobile industries of Germany, France, and Italy into conversion of gas powered vehicles to EV’s, sales of EV’s plummeted after the customary faddish start, just as much cheaper Chinese EV’s flooded into Europe. Germany and Italy forced the European Union into delaying its ill-considered ban on internal combustion engine vehicles past 2035. Those who jubilantly imagined that Europe would commit industrial suicide by destroying its own automobile industry, will have to revise their plans. There are now thousands of cheap Chinese EV’s parked at the main ports of Europe with no buyers in sight. As Dr. Peiser pointed out in Calgary, “If this was really about climate change, wouldn’t you want the cheapest EV’s, the cheapest wind, and solar, all from China?”

China’s Abandoned EV Graveyard: Thousands Of Cars Rot In Huge Fields

It is now clear in Europe, as it long has been in the private sector of the United States, that with whole industries and millions of jobs at stake, implementation of net zero policies in the West would make China the dominant economic and industrial power of the world. Even our most naïve and insipid global warming crusaders are unenthused by that bone-chilling prospect. Although Germany has finally acted to protect its auto industry, it is not yet doing the same for the public. It is still officially planning to ban weekend driving to meet climate targets. If the federal German government proceeds with such an insane plan, it will sink without a ripple at the next election.

There have even been some murmurings of emulation of this course in Canada; on Sept. 14, 2021, Journal Metro of Quebec proposed pre-emptively moving against a climate crisis by lockdown measures, an emulation of the Covid lockdown then ending, but including rations and limitations on personal travel. This proposal comes from the same sort of thinking that seeks to eliminate meat by a war on bovine flatulence.

Placid and docile toward virtue-posturing though Canadians are,
insane measures like these to mitigate climate change would surely
prove to be the funeral pyre of the coercive climate change terrorists.

For notorious historic reasons, Europe is always vulnerable to the madnesses and outrages of the left. The senior human rights court in Europe ruled three weeks ago in a lawsuit brought by 2000 elderly Swiss women against the Swiss government that it had violated the human rights of the plaintiffs by insufficiently mitigating climate change. Switzerland is a very small country but is responsible for between two and three per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions, while Canada, a huge country with a much larger population, emits only 1.5 per cent of global emissions, compared to 27 percent for China. The European Court of Human Rights crossed the jurisdictional Rubicon by overruling the voters of a democratic country.

The rationale for hurling millions of auto workers into unemployment and
shutting down Europe’s greatest industry in order to profit the Chinese
is a case that even the most ardent climate-zealots will find challenging.

At the same time that the climate fanatics are encountering irresistible political headwinds, the intellectual arguments of the climate skeptics are becoming steadily more unanswerable. A brief filed with the court of appeals in The Hague in November by three eminent, American climate-related academics, Richard Lindzen of MIT, William Happer of Princeton, and Steven Koonin of New York University, the Hoover Institute, and former climate adviser to President Obama, challenged the finding of a lower court and held that scientific analysis, as opposed to an aggregation of “government opinion, consensus, peer review, and cherry-picked or falsified data,” shows that “Fossil fuels and CO2 will not cause dangerous climate change, there will be disastrous consequences for people worldwide if fossil fuels in CO2 emissions are reduced to net zero, including mass starvation.” They assert that the poor, future generations, and the entire West will suffer profoundly from any such policy. which “will undermine human rights and cripple the realization of the first three UN sustainable development goals-no poverty, zero hunger, and good health and well-being.”

The three experts warn against equating “the state of climate science with the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” which “have no value as science, because the IPCC is government-controlled and represents only government opinions, not science.” It also denounced the lower court verdict that “dangerous climate change and extreme weather are caused by CO2 emissions from fossil fuels… We demonstrate that these conclusions are contradicted by the scientific method, and only supported by the unscientific methods mentioned. Hundreds of research papers confirm the highly beneficial effects of the increased concentration of atmospheric CO2, especially in dry farming areas.”

They go on to represent the CO2 as essential to food, and thus to life on earth, and that the more there is of CO2, the more food there will be, especially in drought-stricken areas. They also make the case that greenhouse gases prevent us from freezing to death, that there are “enormous social benefits to fossil fuels and that net zero will expand human starvation by eliminating nitrogen fertilizer.”

This highly recondite and meticulously documented paper states that “600 million years of carbon dioxide in temperature data contradict the theory of catastrophic global warming being caused by high levels of CO2, and that the atmospheric CO2 is now heavily saturated, which means that more will have little warming effect.” Up until recently, the zealots pretended that such opinions are held only by the uninformed, or the paid lobbyists of the oil industry, but they are not going to be able to get away with this much longer The ranks of the critics are swelling every week with aggrieved members of the voting public distressed by completely unnecessary skyrocketing costs generated by the fear-mongering climate zealots.

With any luck, the tide of logical evidence will wash away the
climate lunatics of this country before the damage becomes irreparable.

Addendum:  Contents of Brief Filed at the Hague

Shell v. Milieudefensie et al. – Expert Opinion

I. THERE WILL BE DISASTROUS CONSEQUENCES FOR THE POOR, PEOPLE
WORLDWIDE, FUTURE GENERATIONS AND THE WEST IF FOSSIL FUELS AND
CO2 EMISSIONS ARE REDUCED TO “NET ZERO”

A. CO2 is Essential to Our Food, and Thus to Life on Earth
B. More CO2, Including CO2 from Fossil Fuels, Produces More Food.
C. More CO2 Increases Food in Drought-Stricken Areas.
D. Greenhouse Gases Prevent Us from Freezing to Death
E. Enormous Social Benefits of Fossil Fuels
F. “Net Zeroing” Fossil Fuels Will Cause Massive Human Starvation by
Eliminating Nitrogen Fertilizer

II. THE IPCC IS GOVERNMENT CONTROLLED AND THUS ONLY ISSUES
GOVERNMENT OPINIONS, NOT SCIENCE, THUS PROVIDES NO SCIENTIFIC
BASIS FOR THE COURT’S OPINION

III. SCIENCE DEMONSTRATES FOSSIL FUELS AND CO2 WILL NOT CAUSE
DANGEROUS CLIMATE CHANGE AND EXTREME WEATHER

A. Reliable Science is Based on Validating Theoretical Predictions With Observations,
Not Consensus, Peer Review, Government Opinion or Cherry-Picked or Falsified
Data
B. The Models Predicting Catastrophic Warming and Extreme Weather Fail the Key
Scientific Test: They Do Not Work, and Would Never Be Used in Science.
C. 600 Million Years of CO2 and Temperature Data Contradict the Theory That High
Levels of CO2 Will Cause Catastrophic Global Warming.
D. Atmospheric CO2 Is Now “Heavily Saturated,” Which in Physics Means More CO2
Will Have Little Warming Effect.
E. The Theory Extreme Weather is Caused by Fossil Fuels and CO2 is Contradicted by
the Scientific Method and Thus is Scientifically Invalid