Interview by Garry Tank Commander with UKIP David Coburn who succinctly puts the case for climate scepticism whilst likening the SNP behaviour to that of North Korea.

As a former member of “Big Green” – both being part of the wind “industry” and a senior person in the Scottish Green party (even attending their executive), I knew the people involved in the industry and green party and I this article exactly matches my own perception.

If you’ve ever wondered why there is a paucity of skeptical global warming articles from mainstream media outlets, journalist Matt Ridley explains why in his eye-opening OP-ED published today in The Times. He begins by describing how last week, The Times’ editor received a letter from several readers who were unhappy with two articles written by its environmental correspondent.

The letter was from Lord Krebs and 12 other members from the House of Lords (part of the UK’s parliament). In it, the authors admit that The Times’ coverage of the Paris climate conference had been “balanced and comprehensive,” but “denounced the two articles about studies by mainstream academics in the scientific literature, which provided less than alarming assessments of climate change.”
The now-infamous letter, which was “simultaneously leaked to the The Guardian,” provides an insider’s look into how mainstream media outlets, specifically newspapers, are being pressured to shut down any debate about the science of climate change. Essentially, there is a “heavily funded industry” at work, made up of anti-industry organizations, internal university factions, and Big Green environmental groups.
They include organizations like the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), Carbon Brief, Climate Coalition, the Campaign against Climate Change, publicly funded communication factions inside colleges, and worldwide environmental groups like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and World Wildlife Federation (WWF), just to name a few.
Many have multi-million-dollar budgets and others allocate hundreds of thousands of dollars to pounce on “newspapers that publish anything skeptical about global warming.” Many are headed by former environmental journalists who seemingly have a “revolving door between environmental journalism and Big Green.”
Many of the scientists who actually believe in man-made global warming, but don’t think it will be catastrophic, are being targeted. Some are blacklisted, or blackballed, or go unpublished. Case in point, Ridley notes, is climatologist Lennart Bengtsson. After joining the UK-based think-tank The Global Warming Policy Foundation in 2014, the threats against his “healthy and safety” forced him to withdraw. He said it was a situation that reminded him “about the time of McCarthy.”
Other notables who still “brave the bullets” include the distinguished scientists “Judith Curry, Dick Lindzen, John Christy, Nic Lewis, Michael Kelly and David Legates.” Other climate scientists have told Ridley they “dare not put their heads above the parapet.” That’s not science or how it operates. That’s climate McCarthyism. And it’s being spearheaded by the heads of our largest federal agencies, including NOAA, NASA, and the EPA.
Read more: examiner.com

What I would add, is that individual Green party members and even many in the wind “industry” are either just very gullible people who are almost completely clueless about the issues, or they just don’t want to know the truth. That is not a crime in itself, what is criminal is when these gullible idiots then allow themselves to be used as the tools of money making scamsters to attack the far better informed people who after looking at the evidence have decided conscience requires them to be sceptical.
I am ashamed to say that I once counted such people as my friends! Indeed, for a couple of years before I had the integrity and sense to check out the evidence, I may well have been one of them.

The problem with the global warming news is that – finding out there is no cataclysmic event coming our way seldom if ever makes the news. And indeed, almost everything that gets into the newspapers these days is firstly in some eco-nutter newspaper like the Guardian or BBC that no one takes serious (except apparently gullible politicians), and it is invariably just a rehashing of something we’ve all heard before.
So, once I read the headline, I didn’t see much point reading about another study that shows the blindingly obvious fact that CO2 is good for life on earth:

Earth getting greener with rising carbon dioxide levels

However, apparently it is making waves today, which is why I’m blogging about something that is so patently obvious that …. well it is actually just “settled science”.
I particularly liked this comment from some frustration globalwarmingist:

At the time that we are being warned about the increasing risk of catastrophic cascading climate related disaster we are allowing this nonsense on Radio New Zealand website. Why?

The frustration that the evidence and science says the opposite of what they believe is very clear … so is their immediate reaction of banning the scientific evidence because it does not support them.
I doubt there are many more newsworthy STORIES that the eco-nutters can dream up. Now the only newsworthy stories are those that show the scam is scam.
Mother nature is winning and the climate nutters are slowly being dragged kicking and screaming off the stage.

I spent a few days this week creating a greenhouse gas model of the atmosphere – originally intended to show that the greenhouse effect on the various planets can easily be explained using fairly straightforward physics.
Initially, I created a model based on a single greenhouse gas molecule which acted uniformly across the IR band and with no clouds. I didn’t have figures of the scale of IR absorption I should use, so I simply put in a fudge factor to bring the greenhouse effect to 33C.
However, when for interest I looked at the effect of doubling this greenhouse gas concentration, I got a massive response (perhaps 4C/doubling). So, for interest I then added a second greenhouse gas which was modelled as if the two gases were equal in effect, but one (assumed CO2) absorbed in one fraction of the spectrum and the other in the remaining part (assumed to be H2O). However, when I tried to tune the effect to get the required 1C/doubling of CO2, I found I needed to reduce the band occupied by CO2 to 4% which was quite ridiculous. It appeared I was making a simple arithmetic error somewhere but I just could not find it.
So, next I decided to use actual gas constants for CO2 and H2O. But that suggested the figure I was using was about 1/100 of the actual value. So, finally I tried to model the actual concentrations of water vapour in the atmosphere.
 
Only when I added this second greenhouse gas could I get anything near the typical figures used for gas typical absorption coefficients (and I had to work these out myself using tables and planck laws). However the kind of result I get is as follows. For simplicity I plot the percentage of radiation leaving the planet from each layer for the two greenhouse gases I have. (note this also has a 10% “cloud effect” – which is treated as a raised surface of fixed temperature at a cloud height covering 10% of the “window”).
There are still large errors in this graph – probably because the model and atmosphere are very sensitive to “masking effects” whereby each additional complexity – such as adding clouds, seems to reduce the fudge factor I need and in turn reduces the impact of CO2. So, the current model gives a greenhouse effect of doubling CO2 of 2C – but with a “fudge factor” of ~0.5.
What this means is that in order to get a greenhouse effect of around 33C, I have to scale down the absorption coefficients by 50%, but because probably because the effect of doubling CO2 has a logarithmic impact the effect of a doubling of CO2 has the same impact and so remains twice as high even when the total greenhouse effect is scaled down appropriately.
In other words, the models are extremely sensitive to the assumptions made about which greenhouse gases and how their frequencies overlap.
And, perversely, whereas I would intuitively have thought that a less complex model with less elements would tend to underestimate the greenhouse effect, I’m finding in practice that the simplest models tend to over-estimate the sensitivity of elements like CO2. And thus the more complex the model, it would seem the lower the CO2 sensitivity would become.
The obvious missing element are clouds & “band masking”. And e.g. I couldn’t hope to model the greenhouse effect on Venus if I did not take account of the massive layer of clouds in its atmosphere.
But band masking is a serious problem for me (and indeed anyone doing modelling), because CO2 absorbs in the same spectral region that water vapour is active as seen below. As you can see water vapour absorbs around half the frequencies between 10-20um where CO2 has its absorption band in the infra-red. (Which might equate to my 0.5 fudge factor, but I’ve made similar assumptions with the model before and been wrong). And it was precisely because of this “band masking” (but in a much more complex form) that Hermann Harde calculated a much smaller climate sensitivity.
To model the CO2/H2O I started by treating CO2 as being exclusively dominant in a narrow band of the IR (16% 13.235 – 16.660um). Then to get a more sensible greenhouse sensitivity I added water vapour as being dominant in its own “band”. (77%) Unforunately, the absorption data I am using gives no data for H2O in the CO2 band, but the above graph says otherwise. I could guess the effect, but should I just replace one fudge factor with another?
The cloud effect is more complex – because water droplets behave very different optically to water vapour but for obvious reasons water droplet and water vapour are active in the same spectral regions so I need an even more complex model. I could model tropospheric cloud as if it were water vapour, the effect would be to show a “jump” in the fraction of IR from water in the top graph at the tropospheric cloud layer (and the curve below would be adjusted to show less effect from H2O). However, if I add tropospheric cloud, I then feel I ought to add stratospheric cloud – but as the graph shows, I currently have almost no impact from H2O at 20km, the typical height of stratospheric cloud formations.
With a bit of thought I think I could easily add in earth’s clouds – but then how do I translate this to other planets what does “stratospheric cloud” mean on Venus, Mars or Triton? The more complexity I add to the model to represent what is happening in our atmosphere, the less general it becomes and the less it fulfils the original purpose of modelling all atmospheres.

Conclusions of exercise

Firstly I am very surprised that how sensitive the model is to the initial assumptions I make. That is to say, rather than starting reasonably close and getting closer & closer as I add in more detail. The model seemed to “bounce around” giving relatively large changes for small changes in my assumptions and even a fairly complex model still needs a massive 50% fudge factor.
Secondly, some of the behaviour is counter-intuitive. Particularly the way adding in more greenhouse gases & more components seem to reduce the overall sensitivity (CO2 operates relatively high so is least like the ground whilst other components are lower so are closer to the ground temperature).
Third, the overlapping spectrums both in terms of frequency as well as their differing effects with height is a major headache in the model.
Fourth, whilst I’ve used a single “1D” atmosphere – which is a good representation of a well mixed gas like CO2, H2O is not well mixed and there are significant changes in e.g. water vapour concentrations between the equatorial regions and polar regions. There’s also as much as a 40C difference in surface temperature. The ground surface temperature is relatively unimportant, but the differing tropospheric height and water vapour profile will undoubtedly significantly affect the greenhouse effect.

I have been trying to answer a simple question:

“What would happen to our climate if the earth had slightly less atmosphere”

In other words, in which direction would various parameters like temperature, windspeed, precipitation head? What follows is my first attempt to list the possible effects.
Note: I am assuming that a chunk of atmosphere with all the constituents is removed so that (initially) there is no change in proportions of any constituent gases and that the planet allowed to reach a new equilibrium. Also the change is not large enough to cause any dramatic crossing of any threshold or “flip” in the climate.

Pressure

Starting with the obvious, because pressure is the weight of atmosphere divided by surface area, the pressure would drop in proportion to the loss of atmospheric weight.

Oceans gas reserve

Continue reading →

I came across this superb comment by someone named “Odin2”

There is no scientific evidence showing that CO2 emissions have ever been the primary cause of global warming.
Both of the U.S. satellite data sets for the lower troposphere (RSS & UAH v6) show that there has been no global warming in the past 18+ years despite increasing CO2 emissions during this period. If CO2 emissions were a direct and significant cause of global warming, we would have experienced global warming during the 18+ year pause. We did not.
There is no empirical evidence showing that CO2 emissions have been the primary cause of global warming at any time.
The hypothesis about human caused global warming (AGW) is not supported by empirical evidence. The hypothesis is based on computers which overemphasize CO2’s role in climate change and de-emphasize the role of clouds, solar cycles, ocean cycles and other natural causes of climate change. These computers have been notoriously wrong almost all of the time (when compared to real world data) and have been compared to a sports team that played the entire season without winning a game. Computers that model an imaginary planet and are programmed with guesses of a few of the many variables affecting climate are not data or empirical evidence. Ninety-eight percent of the climate models relied upon by the IPCC failed to predict the 18 year and eight month pause and their projections of future temperatures during the last 20 years substantially exceeded the observed temperatures during this period.
The outside atmospheric levels of CO2 are currently around 400 ppm. During the last ice age CO2 levels fell to 180 ppm and plants started to shut down. If CO2 levels had reached 150 ppm or lower, plants would have died off and all plant and animal life on the planet would have died. Green houses regularly keep CO2 concentrations at 1000-1200 ppm because the plants grow better. In the past, CO2 levels have been at several thousand parts per million and plants and animals thrived. US submarines try to keep CO2 levels below 8,000 ppm. Federal OSHA standards set CO2 maximums at 5,000 ppm. When you exhale, your breath contains more than 40,000 ppm CO2. The most predominant greenhouse gas is water vapor and increased CO2 levels are greening the planet.
We are much closer to being CO2 deprived than we are being threatened by too much atmospheric CO2. Plants thrive on more CO2- that is a good thing. CO2 is not a pollutant. It is a weak greenhouse gas that is colorless and odorless which comprises only .04% of the atmosphere (naturally occurring CO2 + CO2 emissions). CO2 emissions were only 3-4% of the total CO2 in the atmosphere. So, CO2 emissions make up only .0012 to 0.0016 % of the atmosphere. That is why blaming global warming on CO2 emissions is like having “the flea wag the dog”.
CLIMATE CHANGE IS NATURAL AND HAS BEEN OCCURRING SINCE THE FORMATION OF THE PLANET. The 18 year and 8 month pause just proves that the skeptics were right all along-natural causes of climate change are more powerful than the insubstantial effects that human generated CO2 has on the world’s climate.
AGW is about power, politics and greed. Every time the facts change due to nature’s failure to cooperate with the AGW hypothesis , the Believers move the goal posts . They have at least 66 excuses for the 18+ year pause in global warming and the failure of the computer climate models to predict it. The Believers blame any unusual (but normal) climate event on global warming based on modeled projections and with no scientific proof. This is often done with a scary picture or one that pulls on the heart strings, and the text of the article will say “could be caused”, “is consistent with”, or “may be caused by” global warming. This is code for we have no scientific evidence but we want to scare you so we can tax CO2 and promote our political agenda and profit from the AGW industry (which we must perpetuate at all costs).

I’ve occasionally encountered alarmists who in their own area of specialism were a “challenge” but seldom if ever have I seen such a comprehensive put down by a sceptic.
Indeed, I was gong to waffle about “who is this sceptic”, but another comment has caught my eye and looks really useful. (link to article)

Following another article “A new Dark Age Looms” in the New York Times, I attempted to make a comment ….
There was a book “eats shoots and leaves” which was no doubt a favourite of those journalists at the NewYork Times, Independent and Guardian, who now engage in a form of “debate” in which they will spew up some vile green trash, shoot it out on the internet and then leave anyone unfortunately enough to come across their vile hatred against the rest of humanity with no means to put the sane point of view.
I can’t understand their mentality, surely comments are one of the best way to get readers and they must know that if the only way they have to win any “debate” is to silence the opposition, then they have already lost.
There’s now a growing number of outlets who ban comments altogether or like the UK Guardian ban commenters like me who they don’t like because I come in and have the gall to list the scientific evidence without getting into a street brawl that allows them to ban other sceptics “legitimately”. Surely this trend marks a growing desperation amongst the green=gullible fanatics in the media and other vile bloggers? (And I must admit I was glad to be banned from the Guardian as it saves me having to read their anti-science garbage)
But, it is very noticeable that it is the same outlets who have been most vocal about “freedom of speech” who are the very first to ban us sceptics. Yes that’s hypocritical, but a much more important point, is that these outlets endorsing these extremists views on climate seem to be genuinely perplexed to find that most people don’t support them. I’ve seen them trying to rationalise all the comments – they try to imagine there’s some “mastermind” behind the commenters, but we sceptics are as likely to argue with each other if we spot errors – so if it were a “co-ordinated plan” the co-ordination is pretty abysmal.
But, gradually, the comments have come to be dominated by sceptics – individuals who are usually far more knowledgeable than the journalists and very easily able to show them up for the copy and pasters they are.
This shows these journalists have been living in a bubble … a bubble where everyone agrees with them and somehow they either believe (or are very convincing in their lies) that “the system” is working against them.
But the reality is completely the reverse. In reality those like the Guardian and BBC are the establishment and it is they who are trying to stop everyone outside the establishment being heard.
Indeed, almost everything these journalists claim to be true about sceptics, has turned out to be the reverse:

• It is greens who are the conspiracy theorist (dark forces behind everything we do!!)
• The greens are funded by fossil fuel companies (Shell/BP were the big companies pushing wind)
• They are the ones destroying the environment (Birdmincers)
• They are the ones attacking the poor (higher fuel prices & wood burning)
• They are the ones who want to stop the world turning green (through enhanced CO2)
• They are the ones using big PR companies and massive budgets to silence the “little people”
• They are the ones who are against freedom of speech
• And they are the mouthpiece of the establishment.

So, it is now my firm belief, that the only people who still support the global warming scam, are those who for whatever reason are able to maintain this “bubble” around them. A bubble that keeps out the sceptics, keeps out the evidence from the climate and most importantly of all keeps in the funding.

A strange coincidence occurred today. I came down to start doing some work and I noticed that it was snowing.
And what should I then find in my email. A paper from Nils-Axel Mörner (who is running the London climate conference) entitled: “When Will the Present Interglacial End?”
Of course it would have snowed irrespective of whether I received the paper, and I would have received the paper irrespective of whether it snowed, but what is the chances of both a very very late snow shower and a paper regarding the timing of the next ice-age from one of the world’s top scientists on the same day?

Mid March I started writing a “brief outline” of the Caterpillar Effect and how thermal induced tectonic plate movement drives the ice-age cycle.
I have already missed two of my self-imposed deadlines and with several key issues still needing “ironing out” which inevitably means adding even more detail. This “brief” article (only covering the essential details) is now 35 pages long, over 10,000 words with approaching 30 figures.
I am looking at publishing it as a short book.
The book will contain at least four new, revolutionary … oops  five! …  new revolutionary ideas, three of which I’ve either not mentioned at all or said very little about on my blog. In the process I’ve looked down the throat of the global warming dragon and seen the vile contents of its stomach, only to realise that it’s just my old caterpillar in disguise and I can now say with complete confidence that there’s no chance whatsoever (or to use appropirate scientific notation – there’s a very low chance that) of us ever suffering from global warming. My main aim now is to try to get the thing finished, that is to say, to complete  full description of the ice-age cycle even if parts have to be speculative.

Josh had a great tweet today:

The #Pause its 58 years old! https://t.co/w1aEk3oZoV … from @SteveSGoddard

— Josh (@Cartoonsbyjosh) April 5, 2016

Which took me by surprise as I’d just been speaking to Josh about the same article. But yes! I suppose technically, although I’ve not checked the data myself, the meteorological balloon data does seem to show around 58 years of pause:

A combination of some old balloon data which Tony found in an old publication (oh how the alarmists must hate these old publications) and recent balloon data which corroborates the lack of recent warming seen by the satellites.