I See a Disturbing Lack of Net Power Calculation

In this story about an interesting idea of making wind energy portable or able to be stored in some fashion, the omission of net power with current turbine engineering belies its conceptual usefulness. The idea of using wind energy to liquify nitrogen, then let it expand again to fill in turbine downtime is novel, but the net power consumption does not even come close to rivaling battery technology right now. Either the turbines need to produce much more power, or the liquification process needs to become much more efficient. Still, lots more basic engineering research needs to be done even to determine if this is a viable solution. Thermodynamics is not a very forgiving branch of physics.

Pikachu is Real!

If you've ever wondered if the electrified hamster known as Pikachu from the Pokemon animated universe was based on something real, now you have your answer.

AP

Side by side comparison of the pika with Pikachu.

Allegedly, the pika's numbers aren't so hot in the Pacific Northwest, so, of course, some conservationist group wants to put them on the endangered species list. The reason: nebulous bugaboo global warming. Can we go back to the days when evil loggers caused all these cute, furry animals to leave their oh-so stable ecosystems and become so stressed out they couldn't make babies anymore? Here, the claim is that the poor pika's fur is so thick, it can't survive if temperatures hit above 80 degrees. Just how long in the future is this alleged endangerment supposed to be? Cuz, last I checked, the Pacific Northwest had more snow than they could handle this last winter, and even global warming predictions don't have North America approaching an 80 degrees average until 1000 years from now. Go figure on that one...

Well, maybe the little pika can adapt by electrifying itself so it can power some air conditioning for its rocky nests.

Bikinis Prove Global Warming!

Most climatologists, geophysicists, and atmospheric scientists agree that the world has been warming since the 1970's. The debate over how much, where, and how is all over the map, and of course the debate over what we can do, if we should, and would it matter is also all over the map. Previously, I had remarked on how the art record being used as a paleoclimate proxy was a little ridiculous, but maybe some new data can change my mind.

Those bikinis have been getting smaller and smaller since the 1960's, and I see no trend showing that they'll get bigger anytime soon. So, this current flat temperature trend since 1998 is just a hiccup before things get really hot! Of course, that means we really need to do something, but if you're not advocating the death of 2.5 billion people, then I'll know you're not really being serious about reducing anthropogenic carbon emissions by 50 percent.

Art Disproves Science!

Actually, not really, but provocative headline, no?

What's interesting is that there are actually a few projects from AGW skeptics which are surveying medieval landscape paintings to help subjectively prove a Middle Warm Period in the European climate record. There is also a similar project to survey art from the Renaissance to about 1850 to look for subjective clues about the Little Ice Age. Why is this important? This is to defend against ten year old rhetoric that right now is the warmest it has been in 2000 years, nevermind that we didn't have a lot of carbon gas producing economies 2000 years ago to make it as warm as it is currently, but whatever. Still, it is pretty ridiculous to look for some kind of climate record hint in art, at least from a scientific viewpoint. What are the variables, the metrics, how do you test your theory that a worldwide rise in temperature inspires more sunny pictures? Will there also be more snowy pictures during the Little Ice Age? Anyway, it's a fun idea, but ultimately more hot air fueling the debate.

IPCC Climate Models Take Another Hit

For those who worry how well climate models can predict the next hundred years, you should be more worried about how well those 22 models used to predict dire consequences of the presence of man-made sources of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere can "predict" the last 30 years. Uh, they can't.

According to the new study by David Douglass, he took the models used by the IPCC, which won the Nobel Peace Prize along with Al Gore, and asked them to predict the temperature trend in the troposphere from 1979 onwards. According to the models, there should be significantly more warming in that part of the atmosphere compared to the surface temperature, and that there should be even more warming in the tropic latitudes. Remember, the models are based on the theory that the carbon based gases are the main forcing for recent warming. Unfortunately, satellite data from the last 30 years shows that the troposphere has been warming at the same rate or less than the surface. That's all 22 models being wrong. An earlier study of 19 of the IPCC models concluded there must be something wrong with the data, but that team used flawed statistics. "Who are you going to believe? Our wonderful little computer programs, or your lying satellites?" I think I'm paraphrasing that...

Quick Reaction to IPCC's SPM

The Nobel Peace Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its Statement for Policy Makers, based on their 4th Assessment Report, late Friday night, making sure the news cycle wouldn't notice some of the items that seem contradictory to the AGW activism narrative.

First, we've injected so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, that even if we stop all industrial and commercial sources right now, as in zero emissions, the earth will keep warming. Second, with this current warming trend, the sea level will rise up to a maximum of 55 inches over the next thousand years. Not one hundred years, but one thousand years. This is assuming we will follow their estimate for increasing carbon dioxide emissions over the next 50 years. Third, they recommend emphasis on the mitigation plans for their predicted climate change: building sea walls, developing drought-resistant crops, and paving dirt roads in all the poorest nations.

Can we now stop with all the carbon-offset scams and carbon-credit trading? But those two schemes were a way for the poor nations to trade their unused carbon-banks (since they have no developed industries anyway), to con the rich countries out of their money to pay, supposedly, for the mitigation projects. Nevermind that those sea-wall projects were usually tied to huge seaside resort proposals. Plus, the anti-GM crop crowd won't like the IPCC's change in tactics either. And paving dirt roads will encourage vehicle use and spur industrial growth, not just keep roads from being washed away in the predicted super-floods, so the emergency response organizations can reach flattened villages. So, will we stop hearing about reducing carbon emissions? I won't be holding my carbon dioxide producing breath.

Carbon Dioxide Removal Outpaced By Emissions

A new report that tries to place a real number on CO2 cycle in North America, estimates that carbon sinks, such as forests, and other sources (though what those others are, the AP neglects to add), only absorb about a third of total emissions. Of course, that's a downer, but more bad news needs to be added to that: the new forests from regrowth suck in carbon dioxide faster than old growth, so even the current absorption rate will decline. You know what that means? We're not doing enough of logging! We gotta cut down those big trees and plant little ones to... SAVE THE PLANET! No, no, what am I saying? Obviously we have to reduce our economic output by two-thirds and trigger global poverty. Geez, what was I thinking?

Yellowstone Is Going To Blow!

A lot of the environmental movement's lunacy comes from the motivation for preservation. The Earth is pretty, and we must keep things exactly as they are! If some landscape is changing, and the Earth becomes unpretty, either we're at fault, or we need to do something, anything, to stop it! Well, the Earth has always been changing, and it's the same arrogance we have to manipulate the environment to make huge cities, that makes us want to manipulate the environment to change it back. Otherwise, why would we ever seriously consider endeavors which bury carbon dioxide under the sea, or spur huge algae blooms with pipes or iron dumping to gobble up that weak greenhouse gas.

It's also this arrogance that fueled the huge fires in Yellowstone in 1988. Bad fire management policies left way too much fuel to burn, instead of letting natural fires from lightning strikes run their course. Now, we have evidence that the ancient supervolcano underneath Yellowstone, which is the geothermal source of all the pretty geysers, is moving the crust upward at about three inches a year. There's no danger of eruption, yet, but when people are going crazy about the sea level going up three inches in a century, I can only wonder what the response would be. Of course, we aren't responsible for the environmental change, but what do you think will happen if the land rise continues, and alters all the pretty landscape? Will there be all this nonsensical talk of diverting the magma with huge pipes? The environmentalists' history of histrionics don't rule it out.

And will there be any histrionics about another land rise? The glacier on Mont Blanc, which has featured prominently as one of the disappearing glaciers due to evil man and his bad breath, has been growing since 2003, and climate weirdos are trying to pin the growth on global warming. The claim is that the icepack is growing because of the higher temperatures causing more winds to keep the icepack in place. So is this good news, bad news, or just head scratching? As a scientifically inquisitive kind of a guy, I always vote for head scratching, because that means new science, which means weak theories get shoved off those glacier growing peaks. Perhaps global models do poor jobs at reconstructing local climate changes, not due to lack of specific variables, but because local climate feedbacks are actually forcings, not the other way around.

Who Pays For The Carbon Offsets?

The AP reports that the California wildfires spewed as much carbon dioxide in a week as all of California's power stations and vehicles during the same timeframe. There's a couple of things I want to point out in this story besides the proper doubt the story brings up. Who pays for the carbon credits in an arson fire? And which agency's numbers do you accept?

I've always felt that man's contribution to greenhouse gases is dwarfed by all the natural sources, and last week's fires definitely highlight that fact. The AP writer also points to the doubted efficacy of carbon offsets and trading when natural disasters strike:

It [a new study] raises questions about how useful it is to plant trees to offset rising carbon dioxide emissions and soothe environmental consciences.

California basically doubled it's carbon dioxide output for one week. How about another scenario? There are all these Pacific islands clamoring for future damages payments set aside by the Kyoto Protocol because predicted rising sea levels might destroy them. These payments are predicated on a member nation's carbon output. What if one of these islands' volcano erupts, gushing forth more carbon than the entire country of Australia in a decade? Are they held responsible for setting back the carbon trading scheme? Likewise for our arson fires, do the convicted arsonists also have to pay reparations to California, or the United States if we ever do join a carbon market, so that they can purchase credits to offset the extra damage?

Right now, there is no mechanism for these kinds of scenarios, because the Kyoto Protocol really doesn't care about reducing overall carbon levels to stop theoretical global warming. If it were, we would know exactly how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere, and how much of it industry actually put in there. But we don't, which brings me to the second thing I want to point out in the article.

Even the carbon dioxide levels we think are being injected into the atmosphere, be it natural or man-made, are theories also. The AP story is basically about a Colorado team about to publish a theoretical paper, and they just decided to apply their new computer program to the wildfires to calculate carbon output. They come up with 8.7 million tons. California's governmental body comes up with 6 million tons. What's the real number? Nobody knows, because those numbers are spit out by computer simulations, whose assumptions about fuel, burn rates, and chemical byproducts, are all theoretical. It's a wildfire model. So when the time comes to offset the carbon contribution of the volcano or wildfire, whose numbers do you go with?

This is why coming up with policy based on models that haven't been proven yet is sheer stupidity. It's taken twenty years to design the proper instruments and satellites to test the greenhouse theory, but they still won't be launched for another five years. When it will take 1000 years for sea levels to rise 23 feet, if the predictions are correct, I think we can wait until the data come in to support the theoretical model outputs. Honestly, what's the hurry? Unless the activists' plan is to get their policies in place before they are proven wrong, so that when the cooling cycle begins again, they can say their world-saving plans are working. But that's pretty cynical. Only someone who doesn't really care about the environment, but is more concerned with the prosperity gap between developed nations and poor nations, and wants to eliminate that gap by slowing working economies down, would come up with motivation like that. But you'd have to buy into economy stopping disaster scenarios like the population bomb, or peak oil. I mean, come on, those wacky ideas are over 40 years old. Nobody still believes them, do they?

Global Warming Had No Role in SoCal Fires

Note to Harry Reid, CNN, and NBC Nightly News: Global warming not a factor in wildfires. When even an LA Times staff writer gets to say that a study shows no link between recent warming and freqency of wildfires in Southern California, those sharing similar biases should pay attention.

The study, however, found Southern California was different from the rest of the West, with no increase in the frequency of fire as temperatures rose.

"In Southern California, it's hot and dry much of the year," said Anthony Westerling, a climate scientist at UC Merced and the study's lead author. In other words, Southern California was already perfect for fire.

I know that making cheap political points, or trying to hype future programming about theoretical human contributions to global warming are important endeavors, but sometimes the facts do have to get in the way of the narrative.

Al Gore Awarded Nobel Peace Prize

Well, they've even give peace prizes to lying terrorists like Yasser Arafat, and look how well that turned out 15 years later for the Palestinian people. So, color me not impressed.

GPS Aids Atmospheric Science

Using an old astronomer's trick called radio occultation, today's atmospheric researchers are using GPS satellites to apply the technique, used in studying other planets' atomospheres, to our own. The way radio waves bend through a gaseous space can tell us the temperature of the gas, which molecules make it up, and it's pressure. Moreover, the data are all time stamped and linked to ground-based atomic clocks for continuous calibration, unlike instruments in weather balloons or older satellites, which may drift over time. Robert Kurinski, at the University of Arizona, is most interested in the troposphere, which, according to most GCM's focused on carbon dioxide increase, should be heating up the faster than any other part of the atmosphere, but the data currently do not show this trend.

"That's the problem with a lot of the climate change data to date," he said. "You don't know if it's because the atmosphere is warmer or the instrument measurements are drifting."

It will be several years before there is enough data to resolve a warming signal, if there is one, and I still believe making any economic policy around unproven model predictions is unwise.

When Environmental Causes Collide

Bucky Katt solves two green issues in one shot.

Just Do Something! Anything!

Even if it doesn't work! There have been some pretty hare-brained schemes to reverse global warming, most of them based on the theory that man-made carbon dioxide is responsible for most of it, from burying the gas under the ocean floor, dumping iron in the south Pacific to spur massive algae blooms, and even buying imaginary permission to use more energy. Now we have the idea of massive pipes to spur algae blooms, instead of dumping iron. Yup, crazy, and the scientists know all their solutions probably won't work:

The two scientists [Lovelock and Rapely] argued it was unlikely any of the well-intentioned technical or social schemes for limiting carbon would restore the planet's status quo.

Whatever that status quo is. Probably before humanity picked up spears. So, why do something on the small chance that it would work, but without knowing any of the effects of these schemes? Isn't this the same argument the supposed environmentalists use for rejecting the use of genetically modified crops? "We don't know all the effects these plants will have on the environment!" It reminds me a bit of an old joke about organized Christianity, when the Pope was informed that Jesus had returned: "Quick! Look busy!" If Gaia decides to bring the apocalypse, I think people will be able to adapt much easier than in eons past.

CA Attorney General Continued "Political Stunt"

Yesterday, I wrote about the California global warming lawsuit, that was dismissed on several legal grounds. But there were a few twists in how the suit finally met its end. It was Bill Lockyer, then attorney-general, who brought the suit against 6 auto manufacturers for future damages from global warming based on their contributions of carbon dioxide emissions. Lockyer got himself elected Treasurer, and many saw the suit, introduced last September, as a "political stunt" in the run-up to the November elections. One of those guys was current attorney-general, Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown. In fact, he gave three very good reasons why the suit would probably be tossed anyway:

1) "One of the principles of tort law is that damages should not be speculative," so Lockyer's lawsuit failed that very simple test.

2) He wondered how Lockyer's suit could assert "causation" between vehicle emissions and the size of California's mountain snowpacks.

3) There was an urgent need to do something about global warming, but seeking national and international cooperation on the issue made a lot more sense than a lawsuit.

These three reasons are the same as my paraphrase of the judge's decision yesterday: [1] can't calculate future damage from global warming for a local region; [2] can't calculate autos' contribution to emissions for CO2 theory for global warming; and [3] can't use the judiciary to make legislative policy regarding emissions. Pretty scary that I'm thinking like Jerry Brown...

Yet, when Brown got in as attorney-general, he pushed this farce of a tort suit, instead of dropping it. Chris Reed's conclusions on his motives seem to be on track, considering Brown's successful emissions lawsuit in San Bernadino County: "He embraced Lockyer's lawsuit as his own even though he doubted its wisdom, because he believed it to be a political winner." Playing politics with unsettled science to further an activist agenda? Environmentalists have never done that before, have they?

Ninth Circuit Tosses Frivolous Lawsuit

It only took a year of wasting California's legal budget, but California's junk lawsuit was dismissed by one of judges most people would think would be sympathetic to an outlandish environmental damages claim. States better learn that the science is settled enough to start treating carmakers like they are tobacco farmers. It took about 40 years of cancer research before anyone could take on Big Tobacco. Here, we have a 9th Circuit judge actually using "logic" to dismiss the suit: can't calculate future damage from global warming for a local region; can't calculate autos' contribution to emissions for CO2 theory for global warming; and can't use the judiciary to make legislative policy regarding emissions. I wrote about this case last year and this is what I predicted:

The carmakers are right to call this a nuisance suit, and this case will get dismissed, with prejudice, at the federal level, just as a case in New York was. Meanwhile, California wastes money on the legal proceedings. Disgusting.

Pretty good, huh? The worst part of the nuisance suit, was that it was suing for future damages, which on its own was a novel legal argument. The democrats here in California really do live in their own version of Fantasy Land, and I'm glad that even the 9th Circuit still has a tangible thread tying them to reality.

Extreme Weather In A Warming World?

Not in Switzerland. It has often been part of the global warming alarmism, that increasing temperatures will bring increasing variance of temperature anomalies, statistically increasing hot weather days, which we know as heat waves. Of course, there is no forcing mechanism explained for why this would be so, but the hypothesis persists and has been included in many GCM's. But climate science is a science, so these things need to be tested. Switzerland, it turns out, is a perfect place to test the variance theory: long historical record, disappearing glaciers, mean surface temperature increase of 2 degrees celsius over the last century. But more hot weather days as the century wore on? No.

This investigation, carried out for a low (Basel) and a high (Saentis) elevation site in Switzerland, has shown that contrary to what is commonly hypothesized climate variability does not necessarily increase as climate warms. Indeed, it has been shown that the variance of temperature has actually decreased in Switzerland since the 1960s and 1970s at a time when mean temperatures have risen considerably. Nevertheless, these findings are consistent with the temperature analysis carried out by Michaels et al. (1998) [that would be usn’s -eds.] where their results also do not support the hypothesis that temperatures have become more variable as global temperatures have increased during the 20th century.

Michaels, who runs World Climate Report, is pretty pleased that he got a mention in the new paper. His reaction: "We’re not going to say we told you so, but … we told you so a decade ago!"

NOAA Didn't Get NASA's Memo

A report from some scientists at NOAA are blaming greenhouse gases for 2006 being the 2nd hottest year on record in America. Unfortunately, the letter is wrong before it's even published, because, according to NASA, 1934 is the hottest year on record, followed by 1998, 1921, and then 2006. 2006 was only the 4th hottest on record. The AP climate science fact checkers are up to their usual standards. Nevermind that the NOAA letter is based on GCM's trying to incorporate the El Niño effect, which has never been successfully managed to any "consensus" satisfaction. NOAA, of course, manages its temperature record differently than NASA, but has not made any corrections or statements regarding the other body's changes. So, we have two federally funded bodies with differing climate records. Consensus?

Mathematician: Climate Models May Never Predict Accurately

In a great science story looking at the guts of most climate models in use today, James McWilliams, an Applied Math and Earth Sciences professor at UCLA, says that the models do not agree with one another in how the Earth's climate will change, and that they probably never will. The problem with the complex mathematical models is not even an initial values issue, which is already an established stumbling block with most models. McWilliams adds another problem he finds in the models: structural instability. Each model has a different set of approximations and calculations for how they handle physical effects. It's these approximations and calculations that scientists take to mean "theory." Each GCM in use today is a set of theories to be tested, and each one also has a different set of initial conditions, also based on theory, which the modelers plug in. Then they change a variable, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to double in 50 years or whatever, and let the models crunch away.

What's great about the Science News article is that McWilliams does not present his findings as fact, but also a theory that needs to be tested. However, his theory is showing a strong evidence that climate models do exhibit structural instability. He goes on to say that the underlying theory that the models are based on, increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere will produce future warming, is sound science. Whether anthropogenic carbon dioxide is causing the present warming, or even whether the doubling of carbon dioxide levels from 1990 is a useful metric, these are things still being debated. None of this matters to McWilliams though.

McWilliams says the modeling community needs to grapple with this issue now to make sure that models are capable of providing answers to the kinds of questions being asked of them. He compares his argument with Kurt Gödel's proof that some mathematical statements are neither provably true nor provably false. Gödel's theorem, says McWilliams, "is understood as a strong cautionary result about making sure that you're asking the right questions before you exhaust yourself trying to answer them."

I like how mathematicians are lazy, some call it efficient, in tackling a problem: they like to know if they can solve it first.

Via GeekPress, who asks the proper follow-up question: should major public policy decisions be based on these models that cannot be proven to be valid?

Solar Cycle Hit Piece

Reuters reports on a new study claiming that recent solar activity is not responsible for the rapid global warming in the last twenty years. However, warmening biases abound as we see AGW skeptics described as a "dwindling group [that] pins the blame on natural variations in the climate system, or a gradual rise in the sun's energy output." Of course, there is no evidence presented to bolster this dwindling numbers claim. In fact, there is a growing record of skeptics breaking their silence.

Warmening credentials are also established in the previous sentence: "Most scientists say emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly from burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and cars, are the prime cause of the current warming trend."

Curiously, the report highlights the statistical analysis of the data, mentioning that they were "smoothed to take account of the 11-year sunspot cycle," but doesn't explain why the scientists would do that, or even which dataset they are analyzing. This appears to be a sly resurrection of the discredited "hockey stick" which had claimed a rapid rise in warming using shaky temperature proxies and shakier computer models. Again, I have to stress, model outputs are predictions based on hypotheses, not data.

Also, the report misrepresents solar variability theories on warming, which claim that peak solar output in the 1970's is related to a twenty year, or so, warming process of the oceans, which then affects mean global surface air temperature. Sad attempt, really.

Update: Thanks to commenter JC, who snagged a PDF of the actual paper in the Reuters story, we learned that solar cycle over the last twenty years was compared to the GISS (Goddard Institute Surface Stations) temperature reconstruction. The researchers employed a "running mean" statistical analysis on both the most recent solar irradiance data and the GISS to tease out any correlation. After removing the 11 year curve, interestingly, the researchers found an overall, yet slight, downward trend in solar output during this time frame. Why that is strange, is because only three years ago, NASA teased out an increasing trend with their analysis. Well, the minimum for sunspot activity just ended earlier this year, so the data in Lockwood's paper are the latest. Other researchers are definitely going to look at the statistical analysis, because Lockwood and Frohlich applied a variable cycle length formula to the running mean analysis. The sun's 11 year cycle isn't exactly 11 years, but variable as well, so other solar experts will want to make sure the downward trend isn't an artifact. This really is a big blow against the solar forcing crowd for climate change because a downward trend with rising temperatures doesn't make much sense. Regarding the lag in their theories, I've seen it as little as two years when tied to sunspots, 4 to 5 years when tied to the hydrological cycle in North America, and as many as 10 (or 20) when there was close association with sunspot activity and the temperature record before 1940. A twenty year downward trend "outlives" all those lag timeframes, at least with the simplistic formulations they present right now. That American Thinker piece might be on to something, if Merrifield can get his math right and add up all the solar cycles together to show why a pretty flat solar irradiance trend now still means a global mean temperature increase.

Problems with this perceived downward trend are the observed increases in solar irradiance detected on Mars and Neptune. Astronomers are going to be busy trying to discount lower albedos (reflectivity) on those respective planets' surfaces as the source of the higher reflected output. Heh. As long as these scientists keep tying their research to climate change, the funding will keep coming.