Thursday, May 14, 2015

Greenies hitting those who can least afford it again



State of the Planet: Better Than Ever

Think about this: There is no time in the history of mankind that would be a better time to be alive than today.

Although most people resist this message, and perhaps it is natural to have a yearning for the simpler times of yesteryear, nearly every objective measure of the state of the planet and the state of human progress shows vast improvement over time. You can find proof of this in about 30 seconds on your iPhone, which has about as much computing power than every computer used by all the nations of World War II.

Why is there so much pessimism about the state of our planet? I recently watched the Earth Day speeches on the Washington Mall and they were drenched with Chicken Little tales of a coming apocalypse.

Here is the way CNN explained what we have to look forward to: “Think super droughts, rising seas, mass extinctions, and acidifying oceans.” Then it warned: “Disappearing coasts,” and “bye bye, animals.”

President Barack Obama sounded the alarm when he warned of climate change: “This is not a problem for another generation. Not anymore. This is a problem now. It has serious implications for the way we live right now. Stronger storms. Deeper droughts. Longer wildfire seasons.”

He claims it is already happening. It reminds me of those campy 1970s buttons: “Stop the planet, I want to get off.”

Forty five years ago when the first Earth Day was held, the catastrophe that awaited us was mass starvation, lost farmland, overpopulation, our supplies of oil and gas running on empty, early death, nuclear winter, and believe it or not, a coming second ice age.

Every single one of those predictions was not just wrong, but spectacularly wrong. The opposite occurred. But the doomsday machine rolls on. The declinism on the state of our planet and the well-being of our species, permeates our schools, our churches, our malls, radio, TV, the Internet and our whole culture.

In sum, our planet is in a miserable state, we’re told over and over.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the single greatest misinformation campaign in world history. The state of our planet and the state of humanity has never been stronger. Nature has never been more bountiful.

I recently wrote of the following six statistics which go a long way to proving how well we are doing. The response from the greens was vitriol and even threats to my physical safety for writing these truths. But no one refuted the facts, because, well facts are facts.

Here they are:

1.) Natural resources are more abundant and affordable today than ever before in history. Short term volatility aside, the price of almost all natural resources — from cocoa to cotton to coal — is cheaper today in real terms than 50, 100, or 500 years ago. This has happened even as the world’s population has nearly tripled. Technology has far outpaced depletion of the earth’s resources.

2.) Energy resources are growing. Energy is the master resource; and it is super abundant. Remember when people like Paul Ehrlich nearly 50 years ago and Barack Obama just three years ago warned that we were running out of oil and gas? Today, in the new age of oil and gas thanks to fracking, the United States has hundreds of years of petroleum and an estimated 300 years of coal. We’re not running out of energy, we are running into it.

3.) Air and water is cleaner than ever. Since the late 1970s, pollutants in the air have plunged. Lead pollution plunged by more than 90 percent, carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide by more than 50 percent, with ozone and nitrogen dioxide declining as well. By nearly every standard measure it is much, much, much cleaner today in the United States than 50 and 100 years ago. The air is so clean now that the EPA worries about carbon dioxide, which isn’t even a pollutant. (And, by the way, carbon emissions are falling too, thanks to fracking). One hundred years ago, about one in four deaths in America was due to contaminants in drinking water. But from 1971-2002, fewer than three people per year in the United States were documented to have died from water contamination.

4.) There is no Malthusian nightmare of overpopulation. Birth rates have fallen by about one-half around the world over the last 50 years. Developed countries are having fewer kids, not too many. Even with a population of 7.3 billion people, average incomes, especially in poor countries, have surged over the last 40 years. The number of people in abject poverty fell by 1 billion between 1981 and 2011, even as global population increased by more than 1.5 billion. That’s just short of a miracle.

5.) Global per capita food production is 40 percent higher today than as recently as 1950. In most nations the nutrition problem today is obesity — too many calories consumed — not hunger. The number of famines and related deaths over the last 100 years has fallen in half. More than 12 million lives on average were lost each decade from the 1920s-1960s to famine. Since then, fewer than 4 million lives on average per decade were lost. When famine does happen, it’s primarily a result of political corruption or malice, not nature growing too little food. Furthermore, the price of food has fallen steadily in the United States - and most other nations steadily for 200 years.

6.) The rate of death and physical destruction from natural disasters or severe weather changes has plummeted over the last century. Loss of life from hurricanes, floods, hurricanes, heat, droughts, and so on is at or near record lows. This is because we have much better advance warning systems, our infrastructure is much more durable, and we have things like air conditioning to adapt to weather changes. We are constantly discovering new ways to harness and even tame nature.

Again, these are just standard facts — though not very well known. But you could look them up. The point is that human advance and growth of the economy leads to a steadily improving and bountiful planet.

And the growth comes as a result of free enterprise. The environmentalists have declared free-market capitalism a near-treasonous pursuit. In reality, free markets with reasonable and sane regulation, will save the planet from extinction. Meanwhile, the socialists, the communists, the Sandinistas, the Stalinists, are the ones who did the greatest damage to the planet - with such avoidable catastrophes as the Chernobyl nuclear accident.

The environmentalists still believe that command and control rules and regulations — on how much water can be flushed from our toilets, what kind of light bulbs we can use, the temperature setting of our thermostats, the amount of solar and wind energy we must use, the type of energy efficiency we get from our household appliances, the amount of water we can use to water our lawns (as in California), even limits on how many kids we can have (as in China) — will save the planet.

They won’t. Freedom will.

This is very good news for those who believe that one of our primary missions as human beings is to make life better over time and to leave our planet better off for future generations. That’s just what we are doing.


The Death of the Green Energy Movement




This wasn’t supposed to happen.









A lesson should have been learned there — but Washington went all in again under Presidents Bush and Obama.

At least private sector investors have lost their own money in these foolish bets on bringing back energy sources from the Middle Ages — like wind turbines. The tragedy of government as venture capitalist is that the politicians lose our money. These government-backed technologies divert private capital away from potentially more promising innovations.




CO2 Hits 'Milestone.' So What?

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced this week that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere set a new record high. Angela Fritz of The Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang reports, “For the first time since we began to track the greenhouse gas in our planet’s atmosphere, carbon dioxide surpassed 400 parts per million in March — a concentration that scientists consider a significant milestone for Earth’s climate and our ability to reverse the trend.” Climate Central’s Brian Kahn says that “CO2 emissions are the main driver of climate change and have risen more than 120 ppm since pre-industrial times.” He adds, “The planet has warmed 1.6°F over that period as well.”

But that claim has come under increased scrutiny in recent years. NOAA says 2014 was the hottest year yet, and this year is on pace to be even warmer. However, satellites — a superior method utilized for temperature recordings — reveal absolutely no global warming in nearly 18 and a half years. So even though CO2 is rising, temperature are not, despite assertions to the contrary. Moreover, as climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer reminds us, it’s been nearly “3,500 days since the last time a major hurricane (Cat 3 or stronger) struck the U.S., which was Hurricane Wilma in 2005.” Why aren’t we celebrating that record? He also notes, “Most people aren’t aware that the atmospheric concentration would have gone up twice as fast if not for the fact that nature loves the stuff. No matter how fast we produce it with our cars and planes and power plants, nature sucks up half of it, like a starving dog that has just been fed dinner. In fact, without CO2 life as we know it on Earth would not exist.” By burning fossil fuels, you could say we’re doing our part to green the planet.



Fish adapt rapidly to climate change  -- within one generation

Gabrielle M. Miller et al.

Carbon dioxide concentrations in the surface ocean are increasing owing to rising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere1. Higher CO2 levels are predicted to affect essential physiological processes of many aquatic organisms2, 3, leading to widespread impacts on marine diversity and ecosystem function, especially when combined with the effects of global warming4, 5, 6. Yet the ability for marine species to adjust to increasing CO2 levels over many generations is an unresolved issue. Here we show that ocean conditions projected for the end of the century (approximately 1,000 μatm CO2 and a temperature rise of 1.5–3.0 °C) cause an increase in metabolic rate and decreases in length, weight, condition and survival of juvenile fish. However, these effects are absent or reversed when parents also experience high CO2 concentrations. Our results show that non-genetic parental effects can dramatically alter the response of marine organisms to increasing CO2 and demonstrate that some species have more capacity to acclimate to ocean acidification than previously thought.

Nature Climate Change 2, 858–861 (2012) doi:10.1038/nclimate1599

Some basic climate background from successful forecaster Bill Gray

I am appalled that scientific objectivity has been so blatantly disregarded by our government and the world’s environmentalists who would use erroneous climate model results to justify their faulty AGW pronouncement which are injurious to humanity.

Gray’s View on AGW.  We AGW skeptics need to be able to offer two basic plausible physical explanations in order to negate the AGW hypothesis.

1.    Why projected CO2 increases over the next 50-100 years will only be able to bring about very small amounts (0.2-0.4°C) of global mean temperature rise.

2.    Why there is natural climate change unrelated to CO2 variations?  We need a believable physical explanation for the global climate changes over the last few thousand years (Little Ice Age, Medieval Warm Period, etc.) and in particular the apparent quite modest global warming of the last century.  We also need an explanation of the shorter time-scale multi-decadal global warming periods (1910-1940, 1975-1999) and of the global cooling or neutral periods (1880-1910, 1940-1974, and 1999-2015).

Explanation #1 can be understood as a result of CO2 increases causing more global precipitation and associated increase in the globe’s deep cumulonimbus (Cb) convective clouds.  These CO2 induced precipitation increases bring about upper tropospheric drying which allows more infrared (IR) flux to space – a negative water-vapor feedback.  This extra rainfall enhances surface evaporation cooling which acts to balance out most of the expected global warming resulting from CO2’s increasing blockage of IR to space (3.7 Wm-2 for a CO2 doubling).  This prevents CO2 increases from bringing about any significant global warming.  Only minimal warming (0.2-0.4°C) is going to occur with a doubling of CO2.  The main effect of CO2 increases will be an enhancement of global average precipitation of about 3 percent.  This enhanced global rainfall will occur in regions where it is already raining and should be hardly noticed.

Explanation #2 can be explained by the multi-decadal and multi-century variations in the globe’s deep ocean circulations (or Meridional Overturning Circulation – MOC) which are primarily driven by space and time variations of oceanic salinity.  Salinity changes occur in ocean areas where there are long period differences in surface evaporation minus precipitation.  This is especially the situation of the Atlantic where ocean evaporation is 10-20 percent greater than precipitation.  Salinity driven ocean changes bring about alterations in the strength of the Atlantic Ocean Thermohaline Circulation (THC), and through Pacific basin upwelling response variations to variation in the Pacific multi-decadal oscillation (PDO) as well.  There is also salinity driven ocean subsidence around the Antarctic continent.  All these factors influence the strength of the MOC.

Most of the globe’s last century weak global warming has, in my view, been a consequence of a modest slowdown of the global oceans MOC.  This last century long MOC slowdown is also detected in an associated weak increase (in milliseconds) in the earth’s rate of rotation.

Lack of Ability of Other Suggested Non-ocean Climate Change Mechanisms to Rival or be Superior to Coming CO2 Influences.  The many other non-ocean proposed physical ideas for climate change (where orbital parameters do not play a role) such as

1.    Solar variability

2.    Sun-spot changes

3.    Cosmic ray variability

4.    Aerosol changes

5.    Human land use changes

6.    Volcanic activity

may each play a minor role in some aspects of the globe’s climate alteration.  But the individual physical influence of each of these suggested mechanisms is too small to be used as a dominant physical argument against the CO2 change hypothesis.

None of the above proposed climate change mechanisms well match the observed past changes in global temperature.  In addition, the magnitude of potential energy change from these above non-ocean physical mechanisms does not have the power to come close to producing the climate changes which the variations of the deep ocean circulations are capable of bringing about.

We AGW skeptics who have proposed non-ocean climate change mechanisms as an alternate to CO2 induced climate changes will continue to have difficulty in rebutting the CO2 advocates.  These alternate physical hypothesizes do not have enough supporting observational evidence to allow any one of them or a combination of them to be judged to be more dominant than the changes which future CO2 increases will be able to bring about.

We critics of the AGW CO2 warming hypothesis need a more dominant alternate physical hypothesis which is stronger and which better conforms in time with the global observations.  Changes in the ocean’s deep circulation currents appears to be, by far, the best physical explanation for the observed global surface temperature changes (see Gray 2009, 2011, 2012, 2012).  It seems ridiculous to me for both the AGW advocates and us skeptics to so closely monitor current weather and short-time climate change as indication of CO2’s influence on our climate.  This assumes that the much more dominant natural climate changes that have always occurred are no longer in operation or have relevance.

Cumulus Convection Influences.  Most cumulus convection is organized in meso-scale cloud clusters containing 10 to 20 individual Cb convective elements which are typically concentrated in areas of 200-500 km wide.  The individual deep Cb convective cells within these cloud-cluster systems are often arranged in lines and new convective elements are continuously being formed and dissipated.  Each new Cb convective element goes through a typical lifecycles of an hour or so.  The strong downdrafts from the late stages of these dying Cb elements typically contribute to the low-level mass forcing needed for the initiating of other new adjacent Cb clouds.  This is why multiple Cb clouds tend to cluster together.

Cb clouds penetrate well into the middle and upper troposphere.  The excess mass within the weakening upper-level Cb elements diverge and spread out as cirrus clouds.  This higher level extra mass and cirrus cloudiness then begins to undergo sinking so as to make space and satisfy mass balance for the new emerging upper tropospheric Cb penetrating elements.

Subsidence Drying.  Cumulonimbus updraft elements have very high rainfall efficiency as they weaken and die in the very cold upper troposphere.  The very cold air at these upper tropospheric levels can hold (even at saturation) very little water-vapor (only about 1% of the low-level moisture content by mass and 0.1 of 1% by volume) compared to the middle and lower tropospheric moisture contents.  This very low water-vapor content air from the upper Cb outflow then sinks, evaporates its cloud particles, and arrives at lower levels where the saturated water-vapor contents are much higher.  The original upper-level dry air then mixes with the lower level air.  This mixture of air at the lower level becomes drier than the air at this level was before any of the upper-level air mixed into it.

A saturated air parcel from a dying Cb cloud which sinks from the 200 mb (12 km height) level to the lower pressure height of 300 mb (10 km ht.) will arrive at this lower-level with a RH of only 10-12 percent of the lower level air.  These unusually large upper-level subsidence drying amounts are a consequence of the very large gradient of saturated vapor pressure in the upper troposphere.  Vertical gradients of saturated vapor pressure at middle and lower tropospheric levels are, percentage wise, much smaller.

An increase in global deep convective (Cb) activity as a result of CO2 increases will thus bring drying (not moistening) to the upper troposphere, just the opposite of the climate models projections.  This upper tropospheric drying acts to lower the infrared (IR) radiation emission level (EL) to a lower height and a warmer temperature where larger amounts of IR energy (σT4) are able to be fluxed to space.  Increases in net global Cb convective activity results in higher amounts of IR energy being fluxed to space, not lower amounts as all the climate modelers and their fellow AGW advocates believe.

Our extensive analysis of the ISCCP data well shows the degree to which the broad upper-level sinking air from the global rain areas have had their RH reduced when an enhancement of the global rainfall rate (and accompanied increase in Cb convection) occurs.  Please see the attached short write-up “Crux of AGWs Flawed Science” for more detailed discussion and clarifying figures and tables.

How Global Temperature Will Change as CO2 Increases.  The rise of CO2 gas occurs very slowly.  By contrast, the troposphere’s hydrologic cycle and its energy dissipation cycle operate on a time-scale of only around 10 days.  Any CO2 radiational induced warming will be quickly felt by the earth’s surface and will immediately act to enhance surface evaporation.  The more surface evaporation, the less the surface will warm.

A doubling of CO2 gas in the atmosphere will cause an alteration of our global climate but not in the same way as envisioned by the climate modelers or by the majority of scientists studying this topic.  Most researchers concentrate only on the direct radiation influences which CO2 increases bring about.  They tend not to consider the other related feedback mechanisms which will be simultaneously activated as CO2 amounts increase.  The increased global evaporation from CO2 increase will extract energy from the earth’s surface and enhance surface cooling.  This will act to reduce the pure radiation assumed 1°C warming through both enhanced IR energy flux to space and enhanced surface evaporation.  The more evaporation from a doubling of CO2 will act to further reduce the 1°C direct radiation only temperature response.  As the CO2’s induced speed-up of the globe’s hydrologic cycle continues the cooling influences of the enhanced surface evaporation-precipitation will greatly suppress any pure radiation assumed rise of 1°C.  Doubling CO2 will thus be able to bring about only a quite modest global warming.  The main influence of a doubling of CO2 will be to increase average global precipitation.  

Basic Flaw of the AGW Hypothesis.  It is the climate models parameterization schemes for cumulus convection (particularly the deep cumulonimbus (Cb) convection) which are grossly unrealistic and which completely negates the global modeler’s projections of 2-5°C warming for a doubling of CO2.  This does not mean that the globe won’t be measurably influenced from CO2 doubling.  But this CO2 influence will occur primarily as an enhancement of the global hydrologic cycle (precipitation) and only minimally from a rise in global surface temperature.

The AGW hypothesis that warming from increased CO2 will enhance global rainfall is correct.  But the assumption that this added rainfall and added tropospheric condensation warming will greatly increase upper tropospheric temperature and water-vapor (through the assumption of constancy of relative humidity) is not at all valid.   The opposite occurs.  Increased deep Cb convection causes dryness to the upper troposphere.  The climate modeler’s large increase in upper tropospheric water-vapor and temperature from added CO2 does not agree with the physics of how real-world deep Cb convection functions.  And the additional positive feedback doubling of the upper troposphere warming and moistening which they add to the direct CO2 radiation blockage is completely bogus.  This additional feedback assumption greatly increases the divergence of their model simulations from reality.    

Summary.  The global climate modelers assumed that CO2 enhanced global rainfall will bring about large upper-tropospheric water-vapor and temperature increases.  These upper-level water-vapor increases are then projected to bring about even larger temperature increases and additional water-vapor (positive water-vapor feedback) amounts which add twice as much additional blockage of infrared (IR) energy to space than the initial influence of the CO2 blockage alone.  Such large water-vapor and temperature increases are not at all realistic.  This is the Achilles-heel of the whole AGW theory.

Comment.  None of the global climate modelers or other AGW advocates seem to know that the globe’s deep cumulonimbus (Cb) convection processes act, not to increase upper level water-vapor, but in an opposite sense to reduce the globe’s upper tropospheric water-vapor content.  The global climate modelers live in a very isolated Ivory Tower world.  Their positive water-vapor feedback schemes in their doubling of CO2 simulations shows that they know next to nothing about how the atmosphere’s cumulus convective and moisture processes really function.

Gray Research Project.  I and my Colorado State University (CSU) research project have a long background in studying cumulus convection, and particularly deep and intense cumulonimbus (Cb) convection of the tropics associated with meso-scale rain systems and tropical cyclones.  We have published a lot of material on this subject over many years.  These convective studies appear to provide crucial background information fundamental to establishing the invalidity of the AGW hypothesis.  My CSU project’s over 50 years of tropical meteorology research has, by necessity, had to make the study of cumulus cloud convection a priority item for the understanding of tropical circulations and tropical cyclones.  Our information has been gained from my project’s extensive involvement in many field experiments and from rawinsonde compositing activities over many years and recently through extensive analysis of ISCCP and NOAA Reanalysis data.  To my knowledge, none of the AGW proponents have ever referred to any of my project’s many published papers and project reports.  

Any scientist having advanced and detailed knowledge and working level experience of the globe’s deep cumulus convection process can completely negate the scientific validity of the AGW hypothesis.  This could have been done decades ago if there had been an open and honest debate and further research on how changes in cumulus convective dynamics are related to CO2 increase.  This greatly needed open and objective debate on cumulus convection process began and was taking place during the late 1960s and 1970s.  But these studies were discontinued during the 1980s-1990s when the global models began to show useful results which the politicians, environmentalists, and the world government advocates could use to back up their desired AGW hypothesis.  They did not want any further tampering with the models and the earlier momentum build-up for cumulus-moist process research did not go forward.  The AGW advocates needed to utilize the unrealistic CO2 doubling climate model warming results as a scare mechanism to advance their agendas.  And the CO2 global climate modeling community was quite happy to provide this justification and be well rewarded for their efforts.

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