For years the BBC have carried what seemed to be an endless propaganda campaign on global warming. I gave up complaining when they falsely called us “deniers” but I can never forgive them for likening those of us who are rightly sceptical of “data” coming from the eco-zealots running NASA to paedophiles. Even for the Biased Broadcasting Company that has become a beacon of bigotry on subjects as wide ranging as Global warming to Scottish Independence (which I disagree with) and Brexit (which I agree with), that was a new low.
So, you can imagine I have been delighted to read the tweets from a well known Scottish BBC presenter Kirsty Wark who is now stuck on a train going no where.

Lordy! The on board staff have just told us they are getting off at Carlisle leaving us with juice coffee and rolls. The driver will carry on until his allotted time is over. We may not get beyond Preston! @BBCNewsnight #virgintrains pic.twitter.com/CieWX64OEg

— Kirsty Wark (@KirstyWark) February 28, 2018

“Faster than fairies, faster than witches, bridges and houses, hedged and ditches.”RLS practically full speed now in a blizzard. @BBCNewsnight #virgintrains pic.twitter.com/j05rBMANAq — Kirsty Wark (@KirstyWark) February 28, 2018

Arghhhh…Multiple points failure ahead! Even worse I’m due to record an interview with #BrettAnderson at 4pm for @BBCNewsnight pic.twitter.com/6PxaWnpxFY

— Kirsty Wark (@KirstyWark) February 28, 2018
 

Stopped again. I hedged my bets & booked a train & a plane. Plane not flying. Maybe I should have rented a snowmobile. In more than 24years commuting to @BBCNewsnight from Scotland I have never missed a show…. now that was a silly thing to say..tempting fate! pic.twitter.com/Ip1RIlk4Ph
— Kirsty Wark (@KirstyWark) February 28, 2018

Is that snow I see? No it can’t be snow! According to the BBC, that snow disappeared years ago and anyone denying that is a global warming denier.

No that’s not snow – it’s merely politically incorrect water.

I’ve already declared this our snowiest winter in the last 20 years living here. The road is covered again. Whilst we don’t get as much snow as some would think (due to prevailing wind off the warm seas), we do usually get one or two snow falls that settle. We once had several weeks of frost – but that was one large snowfall which turned to ice.
This year however, the winter started early and we’ve had repeated snow showers.

This is a little gem I’ve got to share. Apparently not only have academics been daft enough to call the original effect the “Greenhouse effect” – when greenhouses work in completely different ways, but they’ve gone as far as to name something the “anti-greenhouse effect” – thus proving that the name “Greenhouse effect” is a total load of codswallop Continue reading →

And on today’s “Fun with functions” … I’ll explain how to ruin a dinner party with a maths joke:

“There are two types of people the world: those who don’t understand my humour”.
— Mike Haseler (@scotpolitik) February 14, 2018

It is often said that any joke that has to be explained is ruined. However in this case, that might be the joke. So, to add to the excruciating nature of the joke here is my explanation.
There is another joke that goes:

“There are 10 types of people in the world, those that understand binary and those who don’t”.

That of course is what is being referred to by the “two types of people”. However, note that to accurately reflect the original joke it would need to be 10 types of people. That is why this is such a classic. Because you could use the “10” types of people for any base and have three groups:

“there are those who understand binary, those who don’t, and those who know there are more bases than binary and decimal”.

And of course, the number of possible groups can be extended even further … indeed up to an infinite base.
However a base 1 joke  is unique. Because there is only one number in a base one number system and that number is obviously zero.
So, clearly, we could have the joke of the form:

“There are 10 groups of people in the world: those who don’t understand base 1”.

That then fits the general patten of 10 jokes. Thus the humour in this joke is that “two” spelt out as a word does not work. It is clearly wrong – the teller was so bad at jokes they couldn’t even tell it properly. But then again, the pun on “10” only works when written not when spoken. And “those that don’t understand my humour” is only one group. So, the statement is clearly right, because how can anyone understand a joke that is palpably based on false logic and utterly wrong.
And that is the joke …
Which then, when you get it, makes the statement that there is only one group of people false … and it stops being funny.

No, No, No!
Sorry … just kidding!

The real joke is that’s its a a pun on function and dinner part and that the idea that anyone who thought the joke was funny would be invited to a dinner party in the first place.

Having lived in our current house for about 20years, like many people who live pretty ordinary lives, I’m able to reasonably accurately judge what has been happening to the weather in our locality.
We’ve had longer periods of ice – that is snow turned to ice and that did not melt, we’ve had a larger single deluge of snow, but there has not been a winter where we have had so many episodes of falling snow throughout the winter. And it is only mid February! AND the Met Office are now warming of “sudden stratospheric warming” which they say tends to lead to colder conditions.
What is different this winter, is that rather than one episode of snow (of varying scale) – which then goes away with no repetition, this winter “normal” amounts of  snow (perhaps just an inch or two) has been a regular feature. And before any alarmists suggest that snow occurs when it’s warmer – we’ve also had numerous days of ice. Instead, what has been happening is that the WARMER days of precipitation have been cooler.
Is that a trend? No. If I ignore what has occurred this winter, I do not think there has been any trend. However if something similar occurs again next winter it may be.
But whether or not it is part of a trend, I am officially declaring this the snowiest winter I have seen in this house (and there’s still a lot of the winter still to go).
(What prompted this post is that it’s start to snow again).

BREAKING: Tim Ball’s free-speech victory over Andrew Weaver – all charges dismissed! https://t.co/b6Dz1urSwr

— Watts Up With That (@wattsupwiththat) February 14, 2018

When the history of these times are written it will be said that a few decent people stood up to a deluge of delusion and won.

How many times have we heard various people proclaiming that we sceptics are “anti-science”. For those of us taught science at a time when we were taught to be sceptics: to doubt everything until it is proven by experiment, this seems the bizarrest form of insult. Because surely the science is based on the scientific method and therefore to be a good scientist you must be a sceptic?
As a result many sceptics have repeatedly asserted that alarmists are not real “scientists” that they have fallen by the way and are not on the true path of science.
However, what I would like to propose is that whilst science means “knowledge” and scepticism means “doubt” and so they may appear to be contradictory, that scientific knowledge is created through scepticism or doubt as such that they should be seen as complementary not contradictory.
Continue reading →

By a strange path (reading adverse comments by alarmists in a paper I don’t mention) I came across this paper by Robert Ian Holmes which on the face of it would seem to disproves the Greenhouse effect as commonly stated:
Molar Mass Version of the Ideal Gas Law Points to a Very Low Climate Sensitivity
Stunningly it suggests a climate sensitivity for the doubling of CO2 of about 0.03C.

The change would in fact be extremely small and difficult
to estimate exactly, but would be of the order -0.03°C. That
is, a hundred times smaller than the ‘likely’ climate
sensitivity of 3°C cited in the IPCC’s reports,

The approach is brazenly simple. It starts with the ideal gas law:

PV = m/M RT

If converted to density this becomes:

ρ = P/(R T/M)

rearranged this becomes:

T = P /(R ρ/M)

The author then uses the figures from NASA (space) of surface pressure (P), the gas constant R, near surface atmospheric density and the near surface mean molar mass to calculate the Greenhouse temperature for the following:

The correlation is excellent as shown by the following actual versus calculated greenhouse effect:
The only substantial error is with the Greenhouse Temperature of Mars.

Discussion

Although this paper does not refer to them, this confirms the finding by Nikolov and Zeller in which they show that atmospheric pressure is the largest factor affecting Greenhouse temperature. But it then expands on their work to show that several other factors are alos important as well these being the molar mass and density.
One caveat I would have, is that these different parameters may not be independent, and particularly for the less well known planets & bodies some of the parameters may be back calculated so that a match is certain. However this argument will not apply to the better known planets.
Another caveat is that the formula clearly fell down with Mars, but the author rightly highlights that Mars is the body with the lowest pressure.
Taken at face value, the suggested 0.03C greenhouse effect for a doubling of CO2, does does seem to drive a cart and horse through any idea that CO2 could be a problem. However it may not be so simple. I need to think about it and do some analysis.
But at the very least, I will be very surprised if this paper doesn’t cause waves.

 ADDENDUM

After a bit of thinking, I’m wondering whether what we have here is that the temperature is setting other parameters. Pressure is set by the mass of the atmosphere divided by planetary surface area, however it may be that in effect the density and molar parameter are being affected by temperature. In which case it should be a perfect fit.
In other words it’s just a restatement of PV=nRT  in the form P=ρ (R/M) T (where ρ is density & M molar mass). In other words the ratio of pressure to density (P/ρ) =  (R/M) T.

For a long time I’ve been suggesting that reductions in the level of pollution from the 1970s clean air acts was likely to have caused some if not all the warming from the 1970s to the point that clean up effectively came to an end which is around 2000.
And if you look at almost every early picture of the past (before 1970s), what you will see is a clear smog haze created from the burning of coal high in sulphur.

It is hard, not to miss the obvious impact of pollutants in the past, unless that is, you are intentionally ignoring them because your real agenda is not to clean up pollution, but to destroy the modern industrialised economies of the West.
When looking at global temperatures I discovered what is clearly the smoking gun in that the warming from 1970-2000s occurred, not globally as would occur for CO2, but in regional hotspots about 3days downwind from the large 1970s economic zones as shown below.But this issue has become very problematic for those trying to ignore the massive changed due to the clean air acts of the 1970s. Because as the pause continues year after year, and the public just aren’t buying their made up data with the “added warming” flavour, on the one side alarmists want to use the recent increase in Chinese pollution to explain the lack of recent global warming – so a lot of work has gone into proving “it was the Chinese wot done it”. But by the same token, if Chinese pollution could stop warming now, then the reduction in pollution in other areas would cause warming.
So it’s great to see that Climate Depot have understood that 1970s pollution is a perfectly viable explanation of much of recent climate:

• Up to 1970s we saw increasing economic activity with associated pollution and we saw the global cooling scare
• From 1970-2000 concerted efforts were made by the advanced countries to clean up pollution and as a result we saw the cooling-pollution removed which resulted in a very predictable and short-term increase in temperature
• From 2000 not only was the effect of 1970s clean air acts coming to an end but there was increasing pollution from countries like China – and we saw the Pause.

And the alarmists ask? “How can you explain 20th century warming without CO2?” The real problem is how do you explain 20th century climate and the very regionalised nature of 1970-2000 with CO2!

The New/Old Consensus?! Pollution is ‘helping to cool the climate’ – Cleaning Up Air Pollution May Strengthen ‘Global Warming’
Continue reading →

I was supposed to be going to visit in laws today, but looking at the weather we had to call off the visit again – and it’s not like we live somewhere remote – the journey is largely on motorways and what is not is heavily used suburban roads of Glasgow and Edinburgh.
So I went onto twitter – and there what did I read? Yet more rubbish about the “warmist year evah” based solely on the bogus non global temperature metrics they invented when they couldn’t keep denying the pause.
Eventually after contemplating even cleaning the oven, I remembered I wanted to see whether if like sand there was an easily produced critical angle for snow.
Here’s the angle on sand:

And here is what I managed to produce with snow:

Oops how did that get there?
No this is what I managed to produce for snow:

From this experience there are several learning points:

1. That it’s really difficult to photo a white snow pile on a snowy path. (And that recycling bins, whilst entirely useless, do seem to make good backdrops for photos).
2. That it takes a very long time to build even a small pile of snow using a small trowel (I didn’t want to artificially compact the snow using a large spade).
3. That it does form the critical angle
4. Snow is cold and it’s precipitation and it’s a bit stupid going outside without a coat as it melts and runs down your neck.