This is a very good summary of the origin and development of the Global Warming hypothesis and its origin in the Global Governance movement. After all, the first Earth day was set to be the 100 year anniversary of Lenin.
It is over one hour long, but well worth the time. Listen carefully.
Brr, it is cold in Texas, over 3.5 million people are out of power, freezing rain is knocking out power lines and half of the wind turbines are out of commission until they thaw out. The wind chill is way below zero F, and in Galveston they had a snow thunderstorm on the beach!
Maybe wind power is not the best way to go.There are better ways.
That is not all. Efficient wind turbine generators use a lot of rare earth metals to achieve maximum efficiency on the magnets among other things. China still controls over 80% of all rare earth metals mining and refining. This is a national security risk.
How stupid can you get? Here is an example. To de-ice a 747 aircraft costs about 40,000 dollars. Add to this the cost of flying the helicopter, and the fuel it consumes while transporting the glycol from its base to the wind farm.
The rest of the quote: “And I am not sure about the universe.”
There are better solutions to our energy problem:
Lest anyone should think: At least solar panels work well.
Not in this storm!
John Kerry in private jet flies
all over our God-given skies.
Carbon neutral he ain’t;
not my only complaint.
Spews out all the climate scare lies.
Yes, John Kerry must have been the only choice for environmental Czar. After all, he already has six houses, twelve cars, a yacht and his own private jet.
He will promote off-shore wind power, except outside one of his homes, solar power, but no new power lines anywhere near one of his homes, anddo away with coal.
I too want to limit coal consumption, but for an entirely different reason. I want to save some for future generations, and especially when we enter the next ice-age, which may be nearer than most people think.
Now, much better than spend all our natural resources on building wind and solar power is to rapidly develop Thorium Nuclear power for most electricity production. It is the only realistic power source for a Moon colony, and in the last few days of the Trump administration small portable nuclear power stations were promoted for military use. As far as I know, President Biden has not yet rescinded that executive order. Let’s hope he won’t.
Don’t fall for the Paris accord!
A bondage we ill can afford
CO2 keeps us free
Food for you, food for me.
The temperature sham sows discord.
According to alarmists’ climate change models, staying out of the Paris accord will increase global temperatures by 0.05 to 0.17 degrees Celsius by the year 2100, a catastrophe too big to fathom. See the official chart!
These predictions are according to an average of climate change models, all sponsored by various governments in one way or another.
Here is a chart of 73 climate models, and the results of 6 observations.
And how is the current global temperature trend performing right now? There was A “pause” for over 19 years even though CO2 was increasing at 3 ppm (nearly one percent) per year! Then came a temperature rise. Here is a chart of the worldwide UAHv6 for the last 24 years.
With the discrepancy of more than half a degree C between the average of the climate models and observations, it pays to be skeptical of even the 0.17 degrees.
This chart shows the growth of China. Not only are they consuming 47% of the world’s coal production, they are also making 30 times more cement than U.S. Cement production releases CO2, by replacing carbonate with sulfate.
And with the Paris accord, China was free to grow emissions until 2030, up to 6 times U.S. output, and get paid for it! And we were to pay them!
What is China doing with all its cement? Building artificial islands? Bunkers? Ghost cities?
Well, it takes a lot of cement to build artificial islands in the South China Sea!
Newly elected Joe Biden has decided to stop building the Keystone XL pipeline, thus satisfying the environmentalists that want to wean us off our dependency on carbon based products, such as fuel, food and fertilizer. The arguments for denying the decision are nearly exclusively political, while the arguments to build the pipeline are concerns for our national security, economy and the environment.
Here is the deal:
Canada has the tar-sands and is extracting the oil. This was not our decision. If we don’t buy the oil, China will.
We export refined products to the Caribbean islands, which by the way have a larger carbon footprint per person than the U.S. This is good business, since the islands are too small to have a refinery of their own.
It takes more energy to run a refinery up north in a cold climate than in hot, humid Baytown, Texas.
The last time a major oil refinery was built in the U.S was 1976. A small refinery was built in 1993, in Valdez, Alaska. The US. regulatory climate is hostile to refineries. Warren Buffett bought Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad in February 2010 and paid 44 Billion dollars for it. The railroad paid Berkshire Hathaway 2.25 Billion in dividends during the first 13 months. Warren Buffet bought the railroad after President Obama took office, since he nixed the pipeline the first time.
Right now the crude oil is transported from the Athabasca tar sands to Houston mostly by Warren Buffet’s Burlington Northern Santa Fe LLC railroad. It is among U.S. and Canadian railroads that did stand to benefit from the decision to reject TransCanada Corp. (TRP)’s Keystone XL oil pipeline permit.
With modest expansion, railroads can handle all new oil produced in western Canada through 2030, according to an analysis of the Keystone proposal by the U.S. State Department.
https://lenbilen.com/2012/01/25/warren-buffet-profiting-from-working-on-the-railroad/
The cost of transporting the oil is about #14 dollars per barrel, much of it the cost of burning diesel fuel, generating CO2. The pipe-line can do the job for about seven dollars per barrel, much of it capital costs, some of it already spent.
We can see what happens when transporting crude oil: https://lenbilen.com/2013/07/07/ttain-derailment-in-quebec-and-keystone-xl-pipeline-a-limerick/
Warren Buffet is a major Democratic political player; he will again have frequent access to the White House. Last year the Warren Buffet organizations donated 58 million dollars to the Biden presidential campaign.
Sarah Palin once succinctly coined the phrase: “This is Crony Capitalism.”
By not importing oil from Canada the total carbon footprint will increase. We lose, and Canada loses. (I am not concerned that the CO2 is increasing, but that a valuable natural resource is unnecessary depleted.) Now it turns out that Canada has left the Kyoto Protocol but has joined the Paris accord, so they have to export the crude oil to countries that still can expand their fossil fuel burning, such as China, but they would rather export to the U.S.
So why is Joe Biden against the Keystone XL pipeline? Here are seven possibilities:
1. Like Obama, Joe Biden is a true believer that ”this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”.
2. Joe wants to deliberately wreck our economy to create a more fair society of shared sacrifices, refuses to have an energy policy that will create jobs, but will support protest movements and foment unrest.
3. Joe is acting on orders from Global Governance people that do want U.S. to be totally dependent on international law and U.N. mandates.
4. Joe wants to show leadership in implementing the Paris Climate Conference 2015, and its associated treaty.
5. Joe Biden wants to show leadership on something, like touting the “breakthrough” agreement with China, where China is allowed to emit six times as much CO2 as the U.S. by the year 2030.
6. The real reason? Like Obama, Joe is fully bought and paid for, this time by China. The old reason: https://lenbilen.com/2014/02/14/the-real-reason-obama-wont-approve-the-keystone-xl-pipeline/
7. Joe is half insane and surrounded by bad advisors.
This is the best I can do to explain the reasons for this decision.
Re-enter the Paris accord?
A folly we ill can afford.
We’ll help China pollute,
they won’t still give a hoot.
Re-sign is a Damocles sword.
I am a climate realist, that means I look at the totality of what is happening to the climate with increasing CO2 levels, and what it means for our future.
Climate alarmists and IPCC believe that the thermal response to increasing CO2 is a feedback gain from increasing water vapor that results from higher temperatures, leading to much higher temperatures. Current climate model averages indicate a temperature rise of 4.7 C by 2100 if nothing is done, 4.65 C if U.S keeps all its Paris commitments and 4.53 C if all countries keep their part of the agreement. In all cases, with or without Paris agreement we are headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
As the chart indicates, implementing all of the Paris agreement will delay the end of mankind as we know it by at most 4 years.
The cost is staggering. The developing countries want at least 100 billion dollars a year to implement the Paris accord, all paid for by the developed countries. The most infuriating thing about that is that China is considered a developing country, and being a developed country The U.S., while reducing their CO2 footprint will be paying China until the year 2030 to further develop their coal burning electric plants until the China CO2 output is six times our output. They had plans to add 65 GW (+6.5%) of coal-burning power plants this year alone to their grid. The china-virus delayed that by a few months, but their intent is still to dominate the world by 2025. They already consume 48% of the world’s output of coal, produce over half of the world’s steel and cement (it takes a lot of reinforced concrete to create multiple islands in the South China Sea).
Myself and quite a few scientists, meteorologists, but mostly engineers believe the feedback loop in nature is far more complicated than what the climate models suggest, in fact, there is a large negative feedback in the system, preventing a temperature runaway, and we have the observations to prove it. The negative feedback manifests itself in 2 ways:
Inorganic feedback, represented by clouds. If there were no clouds, the tropics would average a temperature of 140 F thanks to the greenhouse effect. The clouds reflect back up to 300 W/m2 into space rather than the same energy being absorbed into water or soil. Clouds are highly temperature dependent, especially cumulus and cumulonimbus clouds. The figure below shows temperature at the equator in the Pacific Ocean.
Cumulus clouds are formed in the morning, earlier the warmer it is, and not at all if it is cold, thunderstorms appear when it is warm enough. The figure shows how temperature in the equatorial Pacific rises until about 8:30 a.m, then actually declines between 9 and 12 a.m. even as the sun continues to rise. The feedback, which was positive at low temperatures becomes negative at warmer temperatures, and in the equatorial doldrums, surface temperature has found its equilibrium. No amount of CO2 will change that. Equatorial temperature follows the temperature of the ocean, warmer when there is an el niño, cooler when there is a la niña. Here is a chart of temperature increases since satellite measurements began as a function of latitude.
The tropics follow the ocean temperature closely, no long term rising trend, the extra-tropics are also stable.
Not so at the poles. the temperature record indicate a noticeable warming with large spikes up and down, up to 3 degree Celsius difference from year to year, especially the Arctic. So, how much has the Arctic melted? Here is a chart of Arctic ice cover for 31 May for the last 39 years.
If this trend continues, all ice may melt in 300 to 400 years, faster if there is further warming and nothing else is changing. Let’s take a look at the Arctic above the 80th latitude, an area of about 3,85 million square kilometers, less than 1% of the earth’s surface, but it is there where global warming is most pronounced. Here are two charts from 2016 and 2017.
Starting at summer 2016, the Arctic was melting quite normally, but something else happened that is not shown in the chart. Every 5 years or so, the Arctic suffer a large storm with full hurricane strength during the summer. In 2016 there was no one, but two such storms, and as they happened late in the season when the ice is rotten they result in a large ice loss, making the ice minimum the lowest on record, and the ice volume nearly 4,000 Gigatons (Gt) less than the 30 year normal. Then the temperature from October thru April did run 7 degree Celsius warmer than normal with a spike as high as 20 degrees warmer. Yet today the deficit is down to 2,500 Gt. What happened? It snowed more than normal. In the Arctic, it gets warmer under clouds, warmer still when it snows. Take a look at Greenland and what happened during the freezing season. It snowed and snowed and Greenland accumulated 150 Gt more ice than normal. So, at that point in the season we were a total of 1650 Gt ahead of previous year, and this was with Arctic temperatures being seven degrees warmer than normal during the cold season. The counter-intuitive conclusion is that it may very well be that warmer temperatures produces accumulation of snow and ice, colder temperatures with less snow accumulates less. What happens during the short Arctic summer? With more snow accumulated it takes longer to melt prevous year’s snow, so the temperature stays colder longer. In 2017 the Arctic temperature was running colder than normal every day since May 1. If this melting period ended without melting all snow, multi year ice will accumulate, and if it continued unabated, a new ice age would start.
The second feedback loop is organic. More CO2 means more plant growth. According to NASA there has been a significant greening of the earth, more than 10% since satellite measurements begun. This results in a cooling effect everywhere, except in areas that used to be treeless where they have a warming effect. The net effect is that we can now feed 2 billion more people than before without using more fertilizer. Check this picture from NASA, (now they can publish real science again) showing the increased leaf area extends nearly everywhere.
In addition, more leafs changes the water cycle, increases evapotranspiration, and more trees and vegetation reduces erosion and unwanted runoff. Good news all around.
In short, taking into account the negative feedback occurring the earth will warm up less than 0.5 degrees from now, not at all in the tropics, and less than 3 degrees at the poles. Without the Paris agreement there will be no increase in the death rates in the cities, except from the slight increase of city temperatures due to the urban heat effect. With the Paris agreement we will have to make draconian cuts in our use of electricity, meaning using much less air conditioning and even less heating, and life expectancy will decline.
We need energy. It takes a lot of energy to clean up the planet. Developing nations should be encouraged to use electricity rather than cooking by dried cow-dung. Coal is limited, and we should leave some for our great great grandchildren. Oil and gas should be preserved for aviation, since there is no realistic alternative with a high enough energy density. Therefore I am an advocate for Thorium based nuclear energy, being safer than Uranium based nuclear energy, and, properly implemented will produce about 0.01% of the long term radioactive waste compared to conventional nuclear power plants. And there is a million year supply of Thorium available. Once the electricity power plants have fully switched away from coal and gas, then and only then is it time to switch to electric cars. The case for Thorium generated electric energy can be found here.
1. A million year supply of Thorium available worldwide.
2. Thorium already mined, ready to be extracted.
4. Thorium based nuclear power will produce Plutonium-238, needed for space exploration.
5. Thorium nuclear power is only realistic solution to power space colonies.
7. Thorium based nuclear power is not suited for making nuclear bombs.
8. Produces isotopes that helps treat and maybe cure certain cancers.
9. Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors are earthquake safe, only gravity needed for safe shutdown.
13. Virtually no spent fuel problem, very little on site storage or transport.
15. No need for evacuation zones, Liquid Fuel Thorium Reactors can be placed near urban areas.
16. Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors will work both as Base Load and Load Following power plants.
17. Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors will lessen the need for an expanded national grid.
18. Russia has an active Thorium program.
20. China is having a massive Thorium program.
21. United States used to be the leader in Thorium usage. What happened?
22. With a Molten Salt Reactor, accidents like the Three Mile Island disaster will not happen.
23. With a Molten Salt Reactor, accidents like Chernobyl are impossible.
24. With Molten Salt Reactors, a catastrophe like Fukushima cannot happen.
25. Will produce electrical energy at about 4 cents per kWh.
26. Can deplete most of the existing radioactive waste and nuclear weapons stockpiles.
28. The race for space colonies is on. Only Molten Salt Thorium Nuclear reactors can fit the bill.
History shows us there has always been climate change, from ice age to the Minoan temperature optimum to the Roman warm period to the dark ages to the medieval warm period to the little ice age to now. The question is, where does the climate go from here, how much will it warm from here, or will it start cooling again? One question is; will wildfires contribute to global warming, or will the smoke act as a cooling agent? The only way to give an answer as a scientist is to look at what the wildfire trends are. Wildfires have decreased 25% worldwide in the last 15 years! This is according to NASA:
the full article is in https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/145421/building-a-long-term-record-of-fire
One recent confession from the governor of California!
The question is then: Why are wildfires decreasing?
One possible exclamation, droughts are decreasing. Let us check:
No, there is no discernible trend in droughts.
Since the beginning of industrialization CO2 has risen about 50%. CO2 is the feed-stock for all plants and indeed the earth is getting greener!
Yes, most areas are getting greener. There are a few areas that are getting less green, such as the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, the South American Gran Chaco, the American South West and the edges of the Gobi desert. The global environmental challenges are still enormous, but thanks to the overall increased vegetation the earth can now feed an additional 2 billion people, not to mention provide livable habitat for many more animals.
What increased CO2 does to global temperatures will come in future installments.
The natural life cycle of forests in the dry part of western United States is rejuvenation and growth, interrupted by forest fires. In fact, the lodgepole pine requires a fire to release the seeds in the cones. Without the fire they will not germinate. Forest fires every generation is the normal occurrence for the dry, western forests. Then in the 1930’s, to stop the wild fires they started forest management in earnest, dead trees removed and underbrush cleared, and wildfires were cut by over 90%. They also harvested a lot of good, mature trees, but that is a different story. The chart below tell the facts:
Forest fires were very few from the late 50’s to late 90’s. But with forest management comes a price. Nature can no longer support as many birds and animals as before, and some species were already vulnerable and close to extinction. So, partly due to the power of the Sierra Club and other organizations it was decided to return nature to its original state as much as possible. That would be fine except we no longer live in the 19’th century, when California had less than a million inhabitants. It now has 40 million inhabitants and use up all the water that rains on it and more. People have to live somewhere, so they make beautiful settlements in tinder dry forests. This is the problem out west. You can not have settlements in an unmanaged forest and get away with it, the fire will get you sooner or later. The solution is to set aside some forest lands for natural growth, but only where nobody lives and manage all other forests. Climate change has very little to do with western forest fires, there has always been years of droughts, interrupted by torrential rains. As it was in biblical times in Israel and Egypt, so it is in the American west.
As CO2 warms up the poles
burned oil, gas and coal play their roles.
CO2 is still good;
makes plants green, grows more food,
and clouds are the climate controls.
We live in interesting times, the CO2 concentration has increased 50% since the beginning of industrialization. In the last 30 years the level has risen 17%, from about 350 ppm to nearly 410 ppm. This is what scares people. Is is time to panic and stop carbon emissions altogether as Greta Thunberg has suggested?As if on cue the climate models have been adjusted, and they suddenly show a much higher rate of temperature increase, in this case what is supposed to happen to global temperatures for a doubling of CO2 from pre-industrial times, from 270ppm to 540ppm.
There are two ways to approach this problem. The models make certain assumptions about the behavior of the changing atmosphere and model future temperature changes. This is the approach taken by IPCC for the last 32 years. These models are all failing miserably when compared to actual temperature changes.
The other way i to observe what is actually happening to our temperature over time as the CO2 increases. We have 50 years of excellent global temperature data, so with these we can see where, when and by how much the earth has warmed.
The most drastic temperature rise on earth has been in the Arctic above the 80th latitude. In the winter of 2019 it was 4C above the 50 year average. See charts from the Danish Meteorological Institute:
Note, there is no increase at all in the summer temperatures!
The fall temperature saw an increase of 4C and the spring temperature saw an increase of about 2.5C.
Notice: In this chart the there is no recorded summer temperature increase at all, but the onset of fall freezing was delayed by 3 weeks.
The 5 thru 8C winter rise of temperature is significant, most would even say alarming, but my response is, why is that?
To get the answer we must study molecular absorption spectroscopy and explain a couple of facts for the 97% of all scientists who have not studied molecular spectroscopy. IPCC and most scientists claim that the greenhouse effect is dependent on the gases that are in the atmosphere, and their combined effect is additive according to a logarithmic formula. This is true up to a certain point, but it is not possible to absorb more than 100% of all the energy available in a certain frequency band! For example: If water vapor absorbs 50% of all incoming energy in a certain band, and CO2 absorbs another 90% of the energy in the same band, the result is that 95% is absorbed, (90% + 50% * (100% – 90%)), not 140%, (90% + 50%).
The following chart shows both CO2 and H2O are absorbing greenhouse gases, with H20 being the stronger greenhouse gas, absorbing over a much wider spectrum, and they overlap for the most part. But it also matters in what frequency range s they absorb.
For this we will have to look at the frequency ranges of the incoming solar radiation and the outgoing black body radiation of the earth. It is the latter that causes the greenhouse effect. Take a look at this chart:
The red area represents the observed amount of solar radiation that reaches the earth’s surface, the white area under the red line represents radiation absorbed in the atmosphere. Likewise, the blue area represents the outgoing black body radiation that is re-emitted. The remaining white area under the magenta, blue or black line represents the retained absorbed energy that causes the greenhouse effect.
Let us now take a look at the Carbon Dioxide bands of absorption, at 2.7, 4.3 and 15 microns. Of them the 2.7 and 4.3 micron bands absorb where there is little black body radiation, the only band that is of interest is at 15 microns, and that is in a band where the black body radiation has its maximum. However it is also in a band where water vapor also absorb, not as much as CO2,only about 20% to 70% as much. Water vapor or absolute humidity is highly dependent on the temperature of the air, so at 30C there may be 50 times as much water vapor, at 0C there may be ten times as much water vapor, and at -25C there may be more CO2 than water vapor. At those low temperatures the gases are mostly additive. In the tropics with fifty times more water vapor than CO2, increased CO2 has no influence on the temperature whatsoever. Temperature charts confirm this assertion:
Here the temperature in the tropics displays no trend whatsoever. It follows the temperature of the oceans, goes up in an El Niño and down in a La Niña. The temperature in the southern hemisphere shows no trend. In the northern temperate region there is a slight increase, but the great increase is occurring in the Arctic. There is no increase in the Antarctic yet even though the increase in CO2 is greater in the Antarctic and the winter temperature in the Antarctic is even lower than in the Arctic. So CO2 increase cannot be the sole answer to the winter temperature increase in the Arctic.
There is an obvious answer. When temperatures increase the air can contain more moisture and will transport more moisture from the tropics all the way to the arctic, where it falls as snow. Is the snow increasing in the Northern Hemisphere?
Let us see what the snow statistics show. These are from the Rutgers’ snow lab.
The fall snow extent is increasing, and has increased by more than 2 percent per year.
The winter
snowfall has also increased but only by 0.04 percent per year. The snow covers all of Russia, Northern China, Mongolia, Tibet, Kashmir and northern Pakistan, Northern Afghanistan, Northern Iran, Turkey, Part of Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Canada, Alaska, Greenland and part of Western and Northern United States.
In the spring on the other hand the snow pack is melting faster, about 1.6 percent less snow per year. One of the major reasons for an earlier snow-melt is that the air is getting dirtier, especially over China, and to some extent Russia. The soot from burning coal and mining and manufacturing changes the albedo of the snow. The soot is visible on old snow all the way up to the North Pole. The other reason is that the poles are getting warmer. In the fall and winter it is mostly due to increased snowfall, but in the spring, as soon as the temperature rises over the freezing point, melting occurs.
So the warming of the poles, far from being an impending end of mankind as we know it, may even be beneficial. Warmer poles in the winter means less temperature gradient between the poles and the tropics, leading to less severe storms. They will still be there, but less severe.
There is one great benefit of increased CO2, the greening of the earth.
Thanks to this greening, accomplished with only the fertilizing effect of CO2, the earth can now keep another 2 billion people from starvation, not to mention what it does to increase wild plants and wildlife. More vegetation also helps to combat erosion.
Having said that, I am still a conservationist. Coal, oil and gas will run out at some time, and I for one would like to save some for future generations, not yet born. In addition I would like to minimize the need for mining, which can be quite destructive to the environment.
The best solution is to switch most electricity generation to Thorium molten salt nuclear power. There are many reasons why this should be done as a priority.
Here are some of them:
The case for Thorium. 1. A million year supply of Thorium available worldwide.
The case for Thorium. 2. Thorium already mined, ready to be extracted.
The case for Thorium. 5. Thorium nuclear power is only realistic solution to power space colonies.
The case for Thorium. 7. Thorium based nuclear power is not suited for making nuclear bombs.
The case tor Thorium. 8. Produces isotopes that helps treat and maybe cure certain cancers.
The case for Thorium 13. Virtually no spent fuel problem, very little on site storage or transport.
The case for Thorium. 18. Russia has an active Thorium program.
The case for Thorium 20. China is having a massive Thorium program.
The case for Thorium. 21. United States used to be the leader in Thorium usage. What happened?
The case for Thorium. 23. With a Molten Salt Reactor, accidents like Chernobyl are impossible.
The case for Thorium. 24. With Molten Salt Reactors, a catastrophe like Fukushima cannot happen.
The case for Thorium. 25. Will produce electrical energy at about 4 cents per kWh.
Len Bilén's blog, a blog about faith, politics and the environment. 