Thursday, March 28, 2024

MAKING GLACIERS IN ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN COUNTRY

 Fifty years ago Freeman Dyson took a bite out of the Energy Crisis by insulating a scarcely used  Princeton  olympic swimming pool, with  foam blocks , and having it plowed full of snow in the winter. When summer came, circulating  chilled water from the massive ice store through the radiators of the Center for Advanced Study quietly did the job of a hundred noisy air conditioners.

Fast forward a half century and a degree of warming to Ladakh, and the locals have turned to making ice all winter to augment their diminishing supply of glacial meltwater, by spraying  pressurized water from downhill pipes to create a new Buddhist art form— the Ice Stupa


Tuesday, March 26, 2024

COUNTDOWN BEGINS ON BRIDGE COLLISION CLIMATE LINK

While The Guardian reports conspiracy theories linking the runaway  Baltimore Harbor  container ship to China, Q-anon, and flying saucers have  already circled the globe, over ten hours have passed without headlines or videos connecting the event to sea level rise, underwater volcanoes, low water levels in the Panama Canal, The Atlantic Meridonal Overturning Circulation, Galactic Cosmic Rays, Gulf Stream eddy temperature anomalies, or the Class 4 solar geomagnetic storm still in progress.

When will UNEP convene an emergency meeting to explain Climate Desk's shocking failure to adapt so valuable a crisis to purposes of publicity, and how it will impact the state of climate communication and the future of existential threat inflation as we know it?

The 948 foot long 157 foot wide vessel  displaced ten times more that the roughly 5,000 tonne steel truss bridge it struck only  a few tens of boat lengths after pushing off from its  container ship port dock, raising questions as to how she came to accelerate so significantly ( reportedly 8.8 knots)  and irreversibly in the confines of the inner harbor.

A coast guard and admiralty law replay of the aftermath of the grounding of the QEII in Vineyard sound is only to be expected, and the most salient question may once more be :

Where was the harbor pilot and what orders did he give?


UPDATES   

Hope has dawned  at Watts Up With That for a Willlis Eschenbach article linking the ship collision to bad thermometer siting and Baltimore's notorious urban heat island effect , pegged on the latest news from the NYTimes:

Peter Eavis
57 minutes ago

Covering logistics and infrastructure

An inspection of the Dali last year at a port in Chile reported that the vessel had a deficiency related to “propulsion and auxiliary machinery.” The inspection, conducted on June 27 at the port of San Antonio, specified that the deficiency concerned gauges and thermometers.

Climate change can also be  invoked in the that the  hasty departure that contributed  to Dali's  accident reflected her being behind schedule because  drought  slowed lock-filling and so delayed  her Panama Canal passage  earlier in March.

Monday, March 25, 2024

  TIK TOK CLOWN TERRIFIES CLIMATE CLERIC

 A Calvinist climate divine who bravely confronted the Pope in Rome recently fled from the clutches of a demonic TikTok clown in the trenches of the Climate Wars

The Most Bizarre Experience of My Life

by  ThD



The first week of February, I had the most bizarre experienceof my life... I thank God I came home alive...In early December, I got an email ... The producers said they appreciated Cornwall Alliance’s perspective and wanted to include it in the “round-table discussion.”
   I'd expected a business-like setting, with a table and chairs and an interviewer dressed in “business casual”...And the interviewer? He was wearing a clown’s suit!… 

This interviewer had, they said, a TikTok channel with millions of viewers. The aim, they said, was to help calm young people’s fears about climate change
    I guess I was too guileless to realize what was up… most of the questions were absurd to the point of ridiculous. I worked hard to say intelligent, interesting answers comprehensible to children, and several times I wove in the gospel and the message that if we fear God we need fear nothing else, but it was a challenge. 

Then, after about 20 minutes, the interviewer stood and announced that he was going to change into a… clown costume,... he said I must do the same. I refused… he began imitating mice, lions, or other animals... 

    By now I was, I confess, traumatized...  I had been wholly in their keeping, potentially in danger, because no one else I knew, not even my wife, knew where they’d taken me...

I don’t know what will be done with that video footage. Will it surprise me by accurately depicting my words about climate and energy? Or, by creative video editing, will it make me look stupid, evil, or both?

Saturday, March 23, 2024

                  SOMETHING SMELLS FISHY AROUND HERE

hi there, Homeschoolers ! 
 let ME HELP YOU ADVANCE scientific illiteracy 
WITH exciting new  videos FROM THE CO2 COALITION!
Watch  Mister Fish show your kids how:
    bananas grow in greenhouses, worms are insects, and fossil fuels save the world from CO2 starvatioN  and mass extinction OF THE plants that DEPEND ON THE GAS OF LIFE!  
    Here's an ark museum friendly clip :

    Friday, March 22, 2024

    IT'S SPRING AND CHEMTRAILS ARE IN THE AIR

    The Tennessee Senate has passed a bill targeting "chemtrails."

    SB 2691/HB 2063, sponsored by Representative Monty Fritts, R-Kingston, and Senator Steve Southerland, R-Morristown, claims:

    It is documented the federal government or other entities acting on the federal government's behalf ... may conduct geoengineering experiments by intentionally dispersing chemicals into the atmosphere, and those activities may occur within the State of Tennessee, 

    The legislation would ban the practice in Tennessee. 





    Thursday, March 21, 2024

           THE ART OF CARBON NEUTRAL SLEEPING

     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEoi_Flv5Hs



                               CUM GRANO SALIS?

    I wish I had known in 2000,  that Stoat's   William Connolley  had transcribed and blogged the following note   from The  Philosophical Magazine  1909, vol 17, p319-320,  The reason being that  it is the journal in which John Tyndall FRS published his experiments on the same subject half a century earlier, a subject I wrote of here in 2014: 

    Bill learned of   Professor R. W. Wood's 1909 work  via the "History of the greenhouse effect" by M. D. H. Jones and A. Henderson-Sellers in  Progress in physical geography, 14, 1 (1990), 1-18. referenced   Jan Schloerer's FAQ: Climate change: some basics.

    Bill presents" the full tect and his comment on why he thinks Wood's second-to-last paragraph " regrettable and wrong."

    XXIV. Note on the Theory of the Greenhouse

    By Professor R. W. Wood (Communicated by the Author)

    THERE appears to be a widespread belief that the comparatively high temperature produced within a closed space covered with glass, and exposed to solar radiation, results from a transformation of wave-length, that is, that the heat waves from the sun, which are able to penetrate the glass, fall upon the walls of the enclosure and raise its temperature: the heat energy is re-emitted by the walls in the form of much longer waves, which are unable to penetrate the glass, the greenhouse acting as a radiation trap.

    I have always felt some doubt as to whether this action played any very large part in the elevation of temperature. It appeared much more probable that the part played by the glass was the prevention of the escape of the warm air heated by the ground within the enclosure. If we open the doors of a greenhouse on a cold and windy day, the trapping of radiation appears to lose much of its efficacy. As a matter of fact I am of the opinion that a greenhouse made of a glass transparent to waves of every possible length would show a temperature nearly, if not quite, as high as that observed in a glass house. The transparent screen allows the solar radiation to warm the ground, and the ground in turn warms the air, but only the limited amount within the enclosure. In the "open," the ground is continually brought into contact with cold air by convection currents.

    To test the matter I constructed two  The bulb of a themometer was inserted in each enclosure and the whole packed in cotton, with the exception of the transparent plates which were exposed. When exposed to sunlight the temperature rose gradually to 65 oC., the enclosure covered with the salt plate keeping a little ahead of the other, owing to the fact that it transmitted the longer waves from the sun, which were stopped by the glass. In order to eliminate this action the sunlight was first passed through a glass plate.

    There was now scarcely a difference of one degree between the temperatures of the two enclosures. The maximum temperature reached was about 55 oC. From what we know about the distribution of energy in the spectrum of the radiation emitted by a body at 55 o, it is clear that the rock-salt plate is capable of transmitting practically all of it, while the glass plate stops it entirely. This shows us that the loss of temperature of the ground by radiation is very small in comparison to the loss by convection, in other words that we gain very little from the circumstance that the radiation is trapped.

    Is it therefore necessary to pay attention to trapped radiation in deducing the temperature of a planet as affected by its atmosphere? The solar rays penetrate the atmosphere, warm the ground which in turn warms the atmosphere by contact and by convection currents. The heat received is thus stored up in the atmosphere, remaining there on account of the very low radiating power of a gas. It seems to me very doubtful if the atmosphere is warmed to any great extent by absorbing the radiation from the ground, even under the most favourable conditions.

    I do not pretent to have gone very deeply into the matter, and publish this note merely to draw attention to the fact that trapped radiation appears to play but a very small part in the actual cases with which we are familiar.


    Why is his second to last paragraph wrong?

    Comments and correction to this section are welcome!

    Firstly, note that unlike the experiments described earlier, this paragraph merely expresses his opinion.

    Second, although the troposphere is subject to convection, the stratosphere is not.

    Third, in contradiction to his assertion about "the very low radiating power of a gas", the troposphere is largely opaque to infra-red radiation, which is why convection is so important in moving heat up from the surface. Only in the higher (colder) atmosphere where there is less water vapour is the atmosphere simultaneously somewhat, but not totally, transparent to infra-red and thus permits radiation to play a part.


    W. M. Connolley, June 2000.


    Apart from the opacity of plate glass to 10 micron room temperature blackbody radiation, I think  the salient difference is one of infrared optical depth-  Wood's 

    enclosures of dead black cardboard, one covered with a glass plate, the other with a plate of rock-salt of equal thickness."  filled with ambient air"

    cannot have been very large because  optical crystals of NaCl were not grown commercially until decades later, and  clear plates or cleavages of natural rock salt rarely exceed ten centimeter size- Tyndall had his own custom made for the 1859 apparatus illustrated in The Philosophical Magazine:

    If Wood built ten cm. wide cubic windowed  black boxes- longer ones would  need a moving telescope mount to keep the sun shining down them-they would contain a liter of ambient air ( then around 300 ppm CO2) per 10 cm of depth, or roughly 300 micrograms of CO2 and 10 milligrams of water vapor at 55% humidity

    The atmospheric column as whole however weighs roughly a  kilo per cm2, or 100 kg per 100cm2 and proportionately present an infrared optical depth some five orders of magnitude smaller than Wood's thermometer enclosures.  So the roughly 45 degree  solar warming he reports  is the work of  the carbon black on his "dead black cardboard enclosures " not the micrograms of CO2 within them.

    Tyndall bought a 3,000 fold increase in his experiment's thermometric finesse by the simple expedient of filling his rock salt windowed tubes completely with  CO2 or hydrocarbon vapors instead of air.

     



    EASTER EGG COSTS RISE AS CLIMATE CHANGE HITS CROPS

    By Justin Rowlatt,            Climate editor, BBC News

    You may have noticed that Easter eggs are more expensive this year.

    But did you know that climate change is one of the reasons?

    Most chocolate is made from cocoa grown in West Africa, but a humid heatwave has blasted the crops and massively cut yields.

    Experts say that human-induced climate change has made the extreme heat 10 times more likely.

    Which? found some popular eggs have risen in price by 50% or more.

    The shortage of cocoa resulting from the heatwave has seen prices soar to almost $8,500 (£6,700) a tonne this week.


                          $20,249,000 BUYS A LOT OF GREEN INK


    The media watchdog site Firebreak recently took the Graun to task for violating its own transparency standards by taking down  its advertorial income pages  , noting that: 

    “In 2017, The Guardian created theguardian.org, a charity wing to fund news stories in The Guardian along the same lines as NGOs fund campaigns... A simple scan of their website showed 52 donations totalling at least $20,249,000 collected in the last five years. The average donation is around $400,000. Most of it was earmarked for stories on:

    • Environmental justice and food security: $1,750,000
    • The Age of Extinction: $1,500,000
    • Biodiversity loss: $1,400,000
    • Factory livestock farming: $2,236,000
    • Climate: $1,500,000
    • Oceans and climate: $1,600,000
                                             

    • This recalls Covering Climate Now's launch party at the Columbia school of journalism, where former White House Chief of Staff  Bill Moyers appeared to kick start the 350 publication editorial collective with a foundation check for $1,000,000.Apart from helping Columbia Journalism Review &The Nation Institute,  promote Climate Desk  and Covering Climate Now , The Guardian and  The Independent  literally rewrote their style manuals, to better serve the climate communication agenda . 

    Wednesday, March 20, 2024

    HE KNOWS EXACTLY WHAT HE WANTS TO KNOW

     

    Bill Walton is the arguably most influential voice of climate denial in the present election cycle.



    Following the 2016 election, Walton:

     " led the Agency Action and Landing Teams for all the Federal economic agencies … for the Donald J. Trump Presidential Transition Team…"

    He has served as President of the Council for National Policy, and as a leader or board member of :

    • The Heritage Foundation, 
    • The American Conservative Union (CPAC), 
    • American Enterprise Institute, 
    • Media Research Center, 
    • US Chamber of Commerce, 
    • National Venture Capital Association,
    • In 2015 he served as Chairman of the Tea Party Patriots.

    So guess where Bill's turned for his 2024 climate playbook?

    CO2: The Miracle Molecules with Dr Will Happer and Greg Wrightstone

    Monday, March 11, 2024

    GREEN NEW DEAL RED BRIGADE MAY INVADE MAR A LAGO

    RISING CO2 IS DRIVING TROPICAL TREES INTO THE SUBTROPICS, AND AS 
    THE 
    RAIN ON THE SPANISH MAIN FALLS MORE WARMLY ON THE PLAINS,
    THE PIRATE INFESTED PARROT JUNGLES OF
    THE MAR A LAGO COAST
     CAN GROW BALSA WOOD FOR WIND TURBINE & PEG-LEG PRODUCTION
    THE CONQUEST OF MARALAGO
    IN WHICH THE LATINX CONQUISTATRIX  INVADES FLORIDA TO SEIZE THE WATERFRONT REAL ESTATE OF  THE DREAD PIRATE TRUMP, AND PUT AN END TO AMERICAN DEPENDENCE ON SPANISH RENEWABLE ENERGY MATERIALS , LIKE PAULOWNIA WOOD:

    Sunday, March 10, 2024

                           NONLINEAR FLUID DYNAMICS :
    CLIMATE IS NOT ALONE IN CANONICAL COMPLEXITY

             MEET TUCKER CARLSON'S SCIENCE ADVISOR

    In January, Twitter ubergeek Tucker Carlson interviewed Willie Soon, who delivered a Putin length stemwinder. Awed by Carlson's rigorous fact checking, Soon limited himself to  statements  falling into three categories:

    1.  :  That's mildly interesting 

    2.  :  That's not true.

    3.  :  That's wrong by several orders of magnitude.

    While  introduced  Soon as an " Astrophysicist and geoscientist who spent 31 years at Harvard."

    Which is odd as he never studied, taught  or held an appointment there, and has a PhD in aerospace engineering, not astrophysics  Soon's only claim to Harvard fame was being repramanded for falsely claiming affiliation:


    Allegations Against Smithsonian Researcher Bring Attention to Harvard 
    By MEG P. BERNHARD and ZARA ZHANG, CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS February 25, 2015

    Although a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who has come under fire amid conflict of interest allegations has no formal affiliations with Harvard, the scientist’s use of Harvard’s name on research has brought attention to the University amid the public controversy.

    Wei-Hock Soon, the controversial researcher based in Cambridge who claims that variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain climate change... is employed part-time by the Smithsonian side of the center and has no formal affiliations with Harvard, according to Charles R. Alcock, director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. 

    Soon is not an employee of Harvard, and there are no records indicating that he has applied for or been granted funds administered by the University, according to a statement from University spokesperson Jeff Neal…

    According to W. John Kress, interim undersecretary for science at the Smithsonian Institution,... Soon does not formally study climate change…

    Soon did not respond to a request for comment on his relationship with and employment at Harvard.

    Although Soon is not a University employee, he has a Harvard email address and... some news outlets have referred to Soon as a “Harvard astrophysicist.” Michael B. McElroy, a professor of environmental studies at Harvard, said it is common practice for scientists to submit journal articles without prior review by their affiliate organizations. Even so, McElroy said he thinks that Soon ... used Harvard’s name inappropriately.

    “The sense was communicated that this was a certified Harvard piece of work. But to my knowledge, neither one of them actually work for Harvard,” McElroy said. "


    Soon's current academic post is , as he admitted to Carlson, as a John Birch Society summer camp science counselor. Soon, who has an aerospace engineering , not an PhD. never attended Harvard or served on its faculty.  

    In 1994, lobbyist and Moonie science guru S. Fred Singer helped Soon secure a Smithsonian Institution post. After coauthoring a paper on solar variabilty with a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, which should not be confused with the Harvard Observatory. Soon used the Center as funding conduit, but was terminated nine years ago after it discovered that the "soft money" it received on his behalf was being granted in exchange for "deliverables" written in support of coal company efforts to downplay or deny the role of CO2, in climate forcing. 

    In the course of the interview Soon told Carlson


    While some might wonder how life survived  the 4 billion year Gas of Life drought preceding the advent of coal mining Carlson nodded cheerfully throughout Soon's spiel.

    However,  those viewing it at leisure with access to science resources on the web 


    may find it edifying to keep score on science according to Soon asth interview progresses, using the handy peer review toolkit developed by Professor John Baez of the University of California:

    A simple method for quantitatively rating potential contributions to science:

    To score each Soon comment , add as you read:

    1. 1 point for every statement widely known to be false.
    2. 2 points for every clearly vacuous statement.
    3. 5 points for each such statement  adhered to despite careful correction.
    4. 5 points for each thought experiment contradicting a  real one.
    5. 10 points for each existing acronym expropriated,  e.g. CERES
    6. 20 points for complaining an index like this "suppresses original thinkers" 
    7. 20 points for every use of anecdote or myth as fact.
    8. 20 points for each use of  " communist libtard" or "reactionary racist."
    9. 30 points for each public appearance with a person in a polar bear or chicken little suit
      Willie Soon , at right
      40 points for claiming that a  "scientific establishment"  or modern-day Inquisition is engaged in a "conspiracy" to suppress your work.
      50 points for for comparing those opposing your ideas to Nazis, gangsters, or the KGB.
      60 points for putting words in Einstein's mouth or chalk
      100 points for displaying both in a single photoshopped image while pretending to take a call from President  Trump:
      Willie channels bogus Einstein quote while taking a call  from a Trump impersonator

    Edited from Original  30 point list © 1998 John Baez

    https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html

    * The concentration of uranium in rocks is ~ 600 times higher than seawater, and  as rocks are  ~2.8 X denser than sea water Soon is off by a factor of a thousand.



    Saturday, March 9, 2024

    14,000 WORD SOLAR FLARE ERUPTS FROM CERES

    Gavin Schmidt needed ten short REAL CLIMATE paragraphs to explain the latest demolition of the efforts of Willie Soon's "CERES team" to blame climate change on solar variability :

    More solar shenanigans

    Which concluded:

    I predict that none of this will prevent Soon and colleagues continuing to cling to the original HS93, or it’s purported extension from Scafetta (which did not dig into the original methodology at all). But maybe they will surprise me. Maybe they will acknowledge the shenanigans and move on to more valid arguments? I won’t hold my breath. 

    Gavin can breathe easy.

    Willie, fresh from bewildering Tucker Carlson, just botted out a response to Chatzistergos' critique.

     It is  fourteen thousand words long.



           SOLAR CITY OF ARKADAG BANS NON-ELECTRIC CARS

     BEHIND THE  WHITE MARBLE A GREEN DAWN UNFOLDS! NEW SOLAR CITY OF THE FUTURE WAS FUNDED BY SELLING THREE TRILLION CUBIC FEET OF NATURAL GAS 

    Thursday, March 7, 2024

    ATMOSPHERIC TRANSLUCENCY TAKES AN UNCLEAR TURN

    PNAS Vol. 121 | No. 11

    Exceptions to Fourier’s Law at the Macroscale

    Kaikai Zhen, Shankar Ghosh and Steve Granick 

    March 5, 2024

    https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2320337121


    Traditional analysis of heat conduction in materials assumes that heat diffuses (Fourier’s law) with exceptions only at the nanoscale. 

    Here, scrutinizing limits of this assumption, we examine translucent materials through which energy also transfers by electromagnetic radiation, and we perform the experiments in a vacuum to avoid air convection. We conclude that the independent pathway of energy transfer by electromagnetic radiation produces macroscopic-scale exceptions to predictions made using Fourier’s law. These empirical findings offer a challenge for theorists and a unique approach to engineer heat management.



    The usual basis to analyze heat transfer within materials is the equation formulated 200 years ago, Fourier’s law, which is identical mathematically to the mass diffusion equation, Fick’s law. Revisiting this assumption regarding heat transport within translucent materials, performing the experiments in vacuum to avoid air convection, we compare the model predictions to infrared-based measurements with nearly mK temperature resolution. After heat pulses, we find macroscale non-Gaussian tails in the surface temperature profile. At steady state, we find macroscale anomalous hot spots when the sample is topographically rough, and this is validated by using two additional independent methods to measure surface temperature. These discrepancies from Fourier’s law for translucent materials suggest that internal radiation whose mean-free-path is millimeters interacts with defects to produce small heat sources that by secondary emission afford an additional, non-local mode of heat transport. For these polymer and inorganic glass materials, this suggests unique strategies of heat management design.


    Monday, March 4, 2024

    CAN CAP'N TRUMP HOOK DISNEYLAND IMMUNITY DEAL?

     

     ORBAN  GETS  MAR A LAGO  AS HIS  EMBASSY,
    AND I GET DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY AS
     AMBASSADOR TO DISNEYLAND

    Saturday, March 2, 2024

                 HOCKEY STICKS FLY AFTER JURY DECISION

    Since the verdict in Mann v. Steyn, WUWT , Climate Depot and Climate Etc. have hosted thousands of anonymous comments adducing the view that as 97% of contrarians think Steyn better informed than Mann they must be as well. 

    Readers are invited to score the amateur peer review process at Climate, Etc.

    https://judithcurry.com/2024/03/01/ipccs-new-hockey-stick-temperature-graph/#comments

    and WUWT as the discussion progresses, using the invaluable quantitative methodology developed by Professor John Baez of the University of California just before the hockey stick's Nature debut:

    A simple method for quantitatively rating potential contributions to science:

    To score each comment , add as you read:

    1. A minus 5 point starting credit.
    2. 1 point for every statement widely seen to be false.
    3. 2 points for every clearly vacuous statement.
    4. 3 points for every statement that is logically inconsistent.
    5. 5 points for each such statement  adhered to despite careful correction.
    6. 5 points for each thought experiment contradicting a  real one.
    7. 5 points for each word in all capital letters,
    8. 5 points for each mention of "Einstien", "Hawkins" or "Feynmann".
    9. 10 points for pointing out that you have an undergrad degree.
    10. 10 points for beginning the description of your theory by saying how long you have been working on it.
    11. 10 points for offering prize money to anyone who proves or finds any flaws in your theory.
    12. 10 points for each acronym you invent or misspelling you report in item 8.
    13. 10 points for asserting your theory is sound and just needs equations.
    14. 10 points for claiming that your work is a "paradigm shift".
    15. 20 points for complaining an index like this "suppresses original thinkers" 
    16. 20 points for pointing to (insert name of  Nova  or National Geographic science episode here .)
    17. 20 points for every use of anecdote or myth as fact.
    18. 20 points for naming an equation after yourself. 
    19. 20 points for talking about how great your theory is, but never actually explaining it.
    20. 20 points for each use of  "libtard" or "reactionary racist."
    21. 30 points for claiming that your theory must be approbated by extraterrestrial civilizations 
    22. 40 points for comparing those who argue against your ideas to Nazis, Maoists or the KGB.
    23. 40 points for claiming that the "scientific establishment" is engaged in a "conspiracy" to suppress your work.
    24. 40 points for suggesting a modern-day Inquisition is hard at work on your case.
    25. 50 points for claiming to have a revolutionary theory without testable predictions.

    Updated from Original list © 1998 John Baez

    https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html