Sometimes one doesn’t need to know any German to understand Eike’s articles.

Energie-Effizienz-Programme sind ein weiterer grüner Flop

Here’s the gist of it:

Energy efficiency has long been touted as a means of political leaders in the fight against climate change without damaging the economy. Included was the premise of a policy both for reducing the consumption of fossil fuels as well as the supposed fact that the consumer save money.

The rationale is that consumers act shortsighted if they refuse to insulate their homes or buy more efficient equipment. They should be pushed in this direction.

But a new study challenges that assumption into question. The investigation in households, public subsidies were availed to their houses from the weather to “upgrade”, revealed that regarding the investment. Efficiency cost far more than they save. Thus, the consumer could not at all act irrationally when they renounce such subsidies: the programs are simply much less advantageous than their proponents believe. (EIKE)

In other words, consumers are acting rationally by rejecting fads that cost them money and it is the gullible academics pushing gullible technology who are being … gullible.

Whilst it’s been pretty obvious that Republicans understand the climate issue and are very sceptical, I was beginning to worry that Democrat candidates might become sceptical and rather than having the show down to end the scam, we might just have got a love in (followed by the usual political inaction).
Fortunately, Democrat voters are still gullible enough to believe in the climate garbage “Dems, GOP Still Disagree on Global Warming“. Hopefully even if the Democrats can field a candidate with the common sense to listen to those like Dr. Ivar Giaever, a Nobel Prize-Winner for physics their own parties will force them into the alarmist camp and we’ll get the show down we sceptics want.
But as we sceptics know, the alarmists will do anything to squirm out of a head to head debate on climate which they know they cannot win.
But …
the other big problem is that the global warming scam is starting to fall apart so quickly that it might be over before the presidential election. That might sound a good thing, but we can’t just let the academics and scammers get away with what they have done. They should pay for their appalling behaviour. The public has to see that such behaviour will not be tolerated and those most culpable should end up in jail.
We cannot let them  slither away into the undergrowth to join the next scare bandwagon.

There’s a strory doing the rounds that Ivar Giaever, a scientist who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics, challenged Mr. Obama in a July 1 speech at the 65th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau, Germany.

“I say this to Obama: ‘Excuse me, Mr. President, but you’re wrong.’ He’s dead wrong,” Mr. Giaever said in a video of his 30-minute speech posted on the website Climate Depot, which first reported the story.

But how is a sceptic to deal with this? Ivar, is just a person and as likely to be wrong as any alarmist. A year ago, he would clearly have been bucking the trend and indeed potentially risking his career and reputation, but now it is almost trendy to be a sceptic.
So what is Ivar claiming:
“I would say that basically global warming is a non-problem,”

That is just a statement of the fact that there is no problems anyone can identify linked to global warming.

“Giaever said his climate research was eye opening. “I was horrified by what I found” after researching the issue in 2012, he noted.

Been there done that – totally agree.

“Global warming really has become a new religion. Because you cannot discuss it. It’s not proper. It is like the Catholic Church.”

True

“the people who are alarmist are in a very strong position”

There speaks someone talking about the problems of academia and from the perspective of a group who still believe that people are gullible enough to actually listen to them.

“Giaever accused NASA and federal scientists of “fiddling” with temperatures.”

I’d certainly convict them of fraud if I were on a jury.

“The other thing that amazes me is that when you talk about climate change it is always going to be the worst. It’s got to be better someplace for heaven’s sake. It can’t always be to the worse,”

How long did it take him to realise this?

That’s about all I can find to criticise (except I don’t really like the colour of his shirt – not really cream nor brown, kind of “sitting on the fence” sort of colour.
But apart from the shirt – Ivar presents a very good summary of all that is wrong with the global warming scam. So well worth reading:
http://www.climatedepot.com/2015/07/06/nobel-prize-winning-scientist-who-endorsed-obama-now-says-prez-is-ridiculous-dead-wrong-on-global-warming/

I thought I would set myself a challenge: how much did academics get right about the climate. I probably missed a few things, but the answer is “not much”.
I’m going to ignore the stupid academic argument that climate is any period longer than their retirement date (so no chance of being proved wrong) and instead use the pragmatic definition that “climatology” is the subject of understanding the behaviour of the atmosphere over periods significantly greater than the yearly seasonal cycle.
So what did those studying this area actually get right? When I checked what was predicted against what actually happened, the only claims with any credibility were:

• A rise in CO2
• Some melting of Greenland (but I’ve since seen evidence to doubt that one)
• A rise in rainfall (again I’m not certain about this as I recall that when I last checked there was no trend)
• Sea level rise (not as a result of late-twentieth century warming, but because there has been a steady underlying rise)

But what about the theoretical basis? Can any theories about the climate be said to have been proven largely correct or even generally accepted?

• Natural variation – correct! (but as most academics publicly strenuously deny natural climate change, it’s hardly a point in their favour).
• CO2 warming – I am convinced that theoretically rising CO2 should lead to higher temperatures, but I have yet to see ANY evidence proving this theoretical connection (but see below).
• Greenhouse warming – I have yet to see any description of greenhouse warming from academics that fits the actual physics. That is not to say that the academics don’t understand the greenhouse effect, just that I’ve yet to see proof they do understand how the greenhouse effect really works (and usually when I start thinking this way I find they don’t know!). As such, given the clear lack of understanding of academia and the clear complexity of the climate, I would need to see firm evidence of the effect of CO2 before I could say for certain that it actually causes any warming let alone significant warming.
• Ice-ages … there is no real understanding of the ice-age cycle.
• Changes of CO2 & temperature over 100s of millions of years. A few: oxygen from photo-synthesis & “rusting of the planet”. Perhaps the link between CO2 levels and plant evolution (probably disputed).
• Geological Carbon cycle – disputed
• Geological nitrogen cycle – I’ve never heard any suggestions
• Thermal expansion of the crust (Caterpillar theory) – denied and/or ignored.
• PDO, Atlantic Multi-decadel, El Nino … some understanding of what symptoms appear, but I’ve yet to see any understanding of why they occur or their role in the climate.
• Solar activity – probably one of the biggest breakthroughs in our understanding of the climate and in science in general is the understanding of how solar activity could affect the climate. Those involved deserve noble prizes – denied because it did not fit the eco-politics of academia.
• Greening of the sahara – not understood
• Urban heating from cutting down plant growth (either not understood or intentionally hidden)
• The role of particulates and e.g. how reducing atmospheric pollution could have been partly responsible for the increase in temperatures after the 1970s clean air acts (either not understood or intentionally hidden)
• The role of volcanoes in cooling the climate (accepted, but lacking credibility when human emissions are then denied as a reason the climate was cooler in the 1970s)
• That the sun keeps us warm (I was getting desperate) and that our temperature is affected by our distance to the sun.
• Moon? (Again I’m tugging at straws – as I’ve nothing much to say about the moon and climate.)

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Any others?

It’s come to my attention from Cedric that the quote below may not apply to CO2 as I originally thought but likely includes the potent greenhouse gas: water vapour. As such the title of my article might be misleading.

Reblogged: Ian Plimer, geologist, blows up the enviro crusade with a few observations

For almost the last year, we’ve been seeing reports from alarmists in effect saying “when the El Nino comes – this will prove its warmer and that will save the dead parrot”.

Continue reading →

The EU superstate was always a daft idea and the Euro was a daft idea within a daft idea.
Greece has suffered severely by having its currency artificially inflated so that its goods were too highly priced to sell. Germany has prospered because its currency was artificially repressed by other countries like Greece, Spain, Portugal (who have also suffered like Greece but to a lesser extent). So Germany prospered as its prices were kept low so it sold far more than it would and Greece and other suffered by having prices far too high internationally.
Economically the right thing is for Greece to leave the Euro, quickly followed by all the other countries who suffer from the dominance of Germany.
… however the Eutopians will not want Greece to be seen to be benefiting from leaving their Eutopian nightmare. Because when other countries see how good it is outside the Euro, they will know they are in a nightmare and want to leave as well.
It is therefore extremely likely that they will try to make leaving the Euro a worse nightmare that staying – in short they will try to make an example of Greece so that no other country will ever want to leave their Eutopian nightmare.
So good luck Greece!

I’m getting sick to death people quoted the “second law” of thermodynamics – agreed not in its proper form, but it is now so abused that I think its time to repeal it.
The second law of thermodynamics is often said to mean that heat can only flow from a hot to a cold body and so a cold body cannot heat a warmer body and that if there is a heat gradient then heat must flow. This is nuts and I would like to present some cases which spring to mind where it is clearly nuts.
Cold bodies can heat hotter ones
1. A coat
When I put on a coat, I get warmer. I can show this by the increase in my skin temperature from around 10C on a winter’s day to around 30C under warm clothing. However, the coat is always colder than my body. Therefore the colder coat is warming me. Continue reading →

After my 5 minute experiment shows IR heats water from above, I didn’t believe there could be any argument that IR heats from above. But apparently I was wrong. Some IR is sneeky and doesn’t get absorbed by the top layer, so it was argued that it was this sneeky IR that was doing the heating.
So, then I thought – let’s just see what happens if you heat all the water from above with IR without letting any IR into the water at all!
So, I simply revised the experimental set up as as follows:

Now, because the silver foil is floating on the surface, all the heating is to the very top of the water. Now, if the theory that IR is only absorbed in the top few um of water, then clearly very soon after applying the heat I would see rapid warming of the surface, it would boil and then the silver foil would fly off. Continue reading →