Jan 12th:
Data from the National Weather Service National Operational Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center in Minnesota show that nearly 71% of the USA has snow cover.
See The Politicization of Science and The Sun Has Spots. Not!
An event similar to the Maunder Minimum (1645-1715) becomes more and more likely as time passes.
[My thanks to WannabeTesla (formerly of freethinking.vox.com) for getting me on a roll again. 
]
Let’s limber up with some charts:
Nature at work. The climate changes. Stop it if you think you can!
The other, major “greenhouse gas” is water vapor and it has very similar radiative properties to CO2. CO2 is a pollutant. (My advice to medical researchers right now is to look into the availability of government grants to study “the ill-effects of second-hand carbon dioxide”.)
I liked this chart of temperature versus time so much, I decided to run it again, but from a different source, rotated 90 degrees and with atmospheric CO2 figured in.
This explains why it feels so cold right now, yeah?
There’s been a little uptick in CO2 lately. Can you see it right at the end of the chart there? Right-hand side. See it?
The simplest statement of the Second Law of Thermodynamics is the heat formulation, due to Rudolf Clausius:
“Heat generally cannot flow spontaneously from a material at lower temperature to a material at higher temperature.”
That is to say that, “heat doesn’t flow from cold to hot (without work input)”.
But, to paraphrase the IPCC description of the atmospheric greenhouse effect:
What is most amazing is that both alarmists and skeptic scientists have taken the above blatant 2nd Law of Thermodynamics violation at face value for so long. Many will shout that all bodies radiate — yes they do but NET heat flow is always from hot bodies to cool bodies (without the input of work), not the reverse. Note also that the 2nd Law does not care about the wavelength of radiant heat.
Now, I don’t know about you, but this “atmospheric greenhouse effect” suddenly smells a lot like deep physics doo-doo.
But according to the rules of whom to believe and whom to consult, the climatologists are fire-walled from those nasty physicists with the ugly German accents. And that’s too bad because this global warming thing, as the climate guys would have it, suddenly smells like some kind of perpetual motion machine. Alchemy.
So, what do the real physicists think? Well, here’s a paper by Gerlich & Tscheuschner, published in March 2009 in the International Journal of Physics, (sorry about that wisecrack about accents, guys) and they are pretty blunt, which is about what you’d expect from Germans. Here’s the abstract from their paper, Falsi fication Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse E ffects Within The Frame Of Physics:
The atmospheric greenhouse e ffect, an idea that many authors trace back to the
traditional works of Fourier (1824), Tyndall (1861), and Arrhenius (1896), and which
is still supported in global climatology, essentially describes a fictitious mechanism, in
which a planetary atmosphere acts as a heat pump driven by an environment that is
radiatively interacting with but radiatively equilibrated to the atmospheric system. Ac-
cording to the second law of thermodynamics such a planetary machine can never exist.
Nevertheless, in almost all texts of global climatology and in a widespread secondary
literature it is taken for granted that such mechanism is real and stands on a firm sci-
enti fic foundation. In this paper the popular conjecture is analyzed and the underlying
physical principles are clari fied. By showing that (a) there are no common physical laws
between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric green-
house e ffects, (b) there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature
of a planet, (c) the frequently mentioned di fference of 33 °C is a meaningless number
calculated wrongly, (d) the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately, (e) the
assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical, (f) thermal conductivity and friction
must not be set to zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsi fied.
I’ve said it before — I am a layman (with nevertheless a very good grounding in the scientific method) — but I foolhardily read the paper (skipping the math). It’s worth at least skimming.
The most shocking thing is this: the Physics department has thought for some time that the common glasshouse works simply by preventing convection. The paper describes some simple experiments you can perform yourself to satisfy yourself of the same. The effects of radiation are insignificant.
Bluntly, they claim there is no such thing as an “atmospheric greenhouse effect”.
Guess the climatologists didn’t get the email…
I am going to end with a statement that just entered my in-tray this evening; a statement by Thomas Chase, professor and climate modeler at the University of Colorado, talking about the CRU emails:
“However, because I teach and do climate research at the University of Colorado, I do assume all my e-mails are the property of the Colorado State Government and if necessary could be examined in depth by the appropriate officials. I am confident that there would be no e-mails, even if “taken out of context,” which would indicate (as the Climatic Research Unit e-mails do) that I was trying to rig the peer review process or trying to keep contrary information out of international summary documents. But these are relatively minor issues.
The real challenge to all scientists is to actively challenge the validity of their conclusions by seeking and supporting independent reproduction of their results. This is the foundation of science: intellectual self-criticism. The single biggest scandal revealed in the emails from the Climatic Research Unit is the lengths they went to refuse outside requests to make data and methodology available over the course of years including discussions about resisting Freedom of Information Act requests. Something like this would never show up in my e-mails. I have always enthusiastically aided anyone trying to reproduce or refute my results.
That the work produced by the Climatic Research Unit is not completely and independently reproducible because the data and methods were actively hidden from public scrutiny indicates that whatever was occurring over time at the Climatic Research Unit, it was never related to science.“
I am going to end with a photo taken this week, which has nothing to do with anything, unless it is perhaps as a harbinger of the awesome might of Nature.
Have a nice day.
Back in July, I made sarcastic mention of sun spots, observation #1024, shown at this NASA site being welcomed by researchers after a long pause. The picture then was about the same as now, #1033; i.e. negligible in usual terms. The sun has been inactive with respect to solar activity for over three years now.
It is believed that this is part of its natural cycle but we may be at a point in the longer, outer cycle that comes about once every 400 years. The normal cycle is 10 or 12 years. Scientists wait with bated breath for the start of the 24th solar cycle because the data suggests that we may otherwise be at the start of a very long pause in solar activity.
Some scientists, as I pointed out in my July post, believe that emissions from solar flares (and the interruption of) have an effect on natural cosmic radiation upon the earth that in turn effects cloud cover. The lack of solar emissions would cause greater cloud cover year-round. The net effect would be significantly lower temperatures, world-wide.
As I cited in my post, historically, we have a record of a similar trough in solar flare activity that caused a period of global coolness known in scientific circles as The Maunder Minimum, (1645-1715), but you may have also heard of it as "The Little Ice Age".
Scientists are still awaiting the start of solar cycle 24. It's marvelous to think that the science of our Sun is still in its infancy and that goes double for the very complex meteorology of our Earth!
(This post is dedicated to my very good friend, mentor, scientist and polymath, Phaedrus, who has closely and in detail followed the climate debate for more than 15 years and is, I think, ready to lose his mind if the lying doesn't stop. )
Take a look at this site for a view of the current show, (and be unimpressed).
After one of the longest sunspot droughts in modern times, solar activity picked up quickly over the weekend.
A new group of sunspots developed, and while not dramatic by historic standards, the spots were the most significant in many months.
"This is the best sunspot I've seen in two years," observer Michael Buxton of Ocean Beach, Calif., said on Spaceweather.com.
Solar activity goes in a roughly 11-year cycle. Sunspots are the visible signs of that activity, and they are the sites from which massive solar storms lift off. The past two years have marked the lowest low in the cycle since 1913, and for a while scientists were wondering if activity would ever pick back up.
During 2009 so far, the sun has been completely free of spots about 77 percent of the time. NASA researchers last month said quiet jet streams inside the sun were responsible, and that activity would soon return to normal.
The new set of spots, named 1024, is kicking up modest solar flares.
Sunspots are cool regions on the sun where magnetic energy builds up. They serve as a cap on material welling up from below. Often, that material is released in spectacular light shows called solar flares and discharges of charged particles known as coronal mass ejections. The ejections can travel as space storms to Earth within a day or so, and major storms can knock out satellites and trip power grids on the surface.
Prior to the low-activity period, astronomers had been predicting that the next peak in solar activity, expected in 2013, might be one of the most active in many decades. That forecast was recently revised, however, and scientists now expect the next peak to be modest.
All this matters because, as laid out in a report earlier this year by the National Academy of Sciences, a major solar storm nowadays could cause up to $2 trillion in initial damages by crippling communications on Earth and fueling chaos among residents and even governments in a scenario that would require four to 10 years for recovery. Such a storm struck in 1859, knocking out telegraph communications and causing those lines to erupt in flames. The world then was not so dependent on electronic communication systems, however.
