theguardianuk--2019-10-11--HMV to open Europe's biggest entertainment store in Birmingham

The biggest music and movies store in Europe opens on Friday as the new Canadian owner of HMV takes the first step in a bold expansion plan he hopes will defy slumping sales of CDs and DVDs.  The size of a supermarket and called HMV Vault, the Birmingham shop is stocking 80,000 CDs and 25,000 vinyl albums. It is a brave move at a time when traditional high-street retailers are closing in record numbers and in a business where online streaming has battered sales of physical entertainment products.  But it is a statement of intent by Doug Putman, the 35-year-old boss of Sunrise Records, which rescued 100 HMV stores from administration in February. He has pledged to invest at least £10m in reviving the chain and wants to make his shops part of local communities, work with charities and – in a sideswipe at Amazon – has promised to “pay our tax”.  UK sales of physical media, including CDs, DVDs and games, shrank by nearly 13% in the year to 25 August, according to market analysts Kantar. In video – mainly DVDs – sales plunged 28%.  HMV’s share of the market sank three percentage points to 14.4% in the three months to 30 June, compared with the same quarter in 2018. But HMV’s loss was Amazon’s gain, because the internet giant’s market share climbed by nearly the same amount and it now accounts for £1 out of every £4 spent on physical entertainment products.  As he puts the finishing touches to his new store, Putman is optimistic: “The market is definitely down but we are way ahead of the market. I’m really happy.” He said the chain had increased its movie sales despite the hefty downturn in the market.  The self-confessed vinyl nut, whose family owns Canadian toymaker and distributor Everest, has already re-opened 14 of the 28 HMV stores that closed after the retailer went into administration in December last year, taking the chain back to 114 outlets.  “I believe we can grow the chain,” he said. “A lot of high streets are challenged and struggling. The UK has got an amazing high street and we want to support that. There is something really special about it and when it’s gone, it’s gone.”  He said HMV had an advantage over Amazon because it offered an experience and was a part of local communities. “We hire people in communities and work with charities and we pay our tax. We do care. Amazon gives huge convenience but every time you get something amazing you are sacrificing something for that.”  “The world’s a scary place if there is just Amazon and ultimately we are all starting to realise that.”  The Birmingham store – underneath a carpark in a less salubrious part of the city centre shopping district – is aiming to offer something Amazon cannot. It has a stage to host bands and DJs and a screening room with space for 50 people alongside its music, film, books, band paraphernalia such as posters, T-shirts, mugs and technology such as headphones and turntables.  “We have more vinyl titles in stock in this store than sold in the whole of last year in the UK,” said Putman. “We need this to be a destination.”  The plan is to open a cafe, too – making it a destination entertainment store in the same way as Primark’s giant store down the road, which draws coachloads of shoppers with its cafes, beauty salon and barbers alongside cheap fashion.  Putman is also confident the UK chain can turn a profit in his first year. Moving out of HMV’s heavily loss-making Oxford Street store in London and agreeing rent cuts elsewhere have helped the bottom line, along with other savings.  “The market will contract but I don’t think HMV will. We will always beat the market,” he said.  “I’m really surprised how supportive customers and the public have been and how much people care and want us to succeed,” he added. “This is just the beginning; people will see more change coming in the next three to six months.”  The company has already achieved Putman’s aim of introducing more vinyl into its outlets. Each now stocks 3,000 to 7,000 albums, up from an average of just 500 before. Later this month, HMV will relaunch online, making it easier to search for and order items.  He is also giving more freedom to managers to stock goods they know will go down well locally. Stores are hosting local bands – and selling their CDs, vinyl or merchandise – and can pick up on regional trends, such as demand for reggae at the Birmingham Bullring store down the road.  Staff recommendations will also be an important part of the future. “We have got so much talent and knowledge in the teams. There are one million songs a month released on streaming services. How can anyone digest that? It’s up to us to say: ‘Here are the best 10 things which came out this week.’ We are trying to be the expert,” Putman said.


breitbart--2019-02-20--Global Warming Doomsday Prophesy 100 Million Climate Refugees by 2050

Global Warming Doomsday Prophesy: 100 Million Climate Refugees by 2050

James Delingpole, the executive editor of Breitbart London, has written about Wallace-Wells’ previous over-the-top predictions about global warming, including an article in the magazine last year:  Climate change is going to kill at least 150 million people and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Well, at least it is if you believe climate doomster David Wallace-Wells in the latest issue of New York magazine. Things are bad. Really bad. We didn’t listen and now we can expect to pay a terrible price — starting with all those deaths: Numbers that large can be hard to grasp, but 150 million is the equivalent of 25 Holocausts. It is five times the size of the death toll of the Great Leap Forward — the largest non-military death toll humanity has ever produced. It is three times the greatest death toll of any kind: World War II.  Now that the book is in print, the author is making the rounds to promote it, including in an interview with National Public Radio (NPR) where he announces more staggering numbers attributed to climate change.  • “4.3 degrees of warming would mean $600 trillion in damages from climate impacts. Six hundred trillion dollars is double all of the wealth that exists in the world today. Our agriculture would probably be about half as bountiful, so the same plot of land would be producing about half as much yield in a world that we would have at least 50 percent more people to feed.”  Delingpole is not the only critic of Wallace-Wells’ climate change reporting.  The Washington Post did a round up of scientists panning his 2017 article:  The temptation to paint a dire picture of climate change, at a time when the Trump administration seems bent on questioning a widely accepted body of climate science and withdrawing from international agreements, is clear. But the picture still has to be plausible and accurate, a number of scientists argued this week in response to a lengthy article in New York Magazine. The article by David Wallace-Wells is entitled “The Uninhabitable Earth” and begins with the sentence, “It is, I promise, worse than you think.” It runs through a number of extreme climate possibilities — most prominently, the idea that some parts of the Earth will experience a combination of heat and humidity so intense that human beings won’t be able to survive outdoors in some regions. The article gives the sense of being fairly definitive, saying it is “the result of dozens of interviews and exchanges with climatologists and researchers in related fields and reflects hundreds of scientific papers on the subject of climate change.” Wallace-Wells also warns that he’s describing worst-case scenarios that might not be realized but could occur if the world does not take action. “But those scenarios, and not the present climate, are the baseline,” he writes. “In fact, they are our schedule.”  Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University is a climate researcher who isn’t always kind to climate change skeptics.  “The article argues that climate change will render the Earth uninhabitable by the end of this century,” Mann wrote. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The article fails to produce it.”  “The evidence that climate change is a serious problem that we must contend with now is overwhelming on its own,” Mann continued. “There is no need to overstate the evidence, particularly when it feeds a paralyzing narrative of doom and hopelessness.”  “Overall, the article highlights important effects that have been discussed in the literature, but in a manner that is often sloppy and hyperbolic,” Bob Kopp of Rutgers University said of Wallace-Wells’ reporting. “It would have been helpful had the reporter identified his sources, which makes it difficult to check what he intended in some points.”  “My purpose in writing the story wasn’t to survey the median scenario, it was to survey the worst-case scenarios because I believed — and still believe — that the public does not appreciate the unlikely-but-still-possible dangers of climate change,” he said.  “It is difficult to tell the story of climate change,” the Post reported. “It never happens on any particular day; it never moves very rapidly; it does not directly cause individual weather events.”  “But a number of scientists are saying that this particular story has gone too far,” the Post reported.


cnsnews--2019-04-03--Schumer If There Were Ever Evidence of Global Warming or of Climate Change This Would Be It

Schumer: ‘If There Were Ever Evidence of Global Warming or of Climate Change This Would Be It’

(CNSNews.com) - Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D.-N.Y.) said on the Senate floor on Tuesday that the natural disasters the United States has experienced over the last two years—including a major hurricane in Puerto Rico—are evidence that “global warming” is in fact taking place.  "Over the last 2 years, the American people have endured staggering natural disasters that have devastated communities across the country,” Schumer said.  “These Americans need help. They need help now,” he said.  “I would parenthetically add, if there were ever evidence of global warming or of climate change, this would be it--despite the fact that just about every Republican has his head or her head in the sand and won’t admit it.”  Schumer made the remarks while criticizing President Donald Trump’s opposition to providing additional disaster relief to Puerto Rico.  Puerto Rico was hit by Hurricane Maria in September 2017. “Maria was a very severe Cape Verde Hurricane that ravaged the island of Dominca at category 5 (on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale) intensity, and later devastated Puerto Rico as a high-end category 4 hurricane,” says a report on the storm published by the National Weather Service.  “It also inflicted serious damage on some of the other islands of the northeastern Caribbean Sea,” says the NWS report. “Maria is the third costliest hurricane in United States history.”  Here is the excerpt from Schumer’s speech where he discusses the disaster assistance and the evidence for global warming:  “Mr. President, the Senate failed to pass emergency relief funding yesterday to help the American families recovering from natural disasters. It failed for one reason--the Republicans removed critical aid for Puerto Rico and other territories from the House bill after President Trump told them to do it. Under this administration and with Leader McConnell's blessing, even disaster relief has now become political. “I don't need to litigate why we are here. Over the last 2 years, the American people have endured staggering natural disasters that have devastated communities across the country. These Americans need help. They need help now. I would parenthetically add, if there were ever evidence of global warming or of climate change, this would be it despite the fact that just about every Republican has his head or her head in the sand and will not admit it. “Regardless of what you think the causes were, Americans have always stood together when American citizens have been hit by disaster. We band together and say we are going to help one another--all American citizens, all. Yet one part of America is not being treated like the others, and why not? It is because President Trump, for reasons that defy decency, harbors an apparent contempt for the people of Puerto Rico. He tweeted again last night and erroneously claimed that $91 billion has been afforded the people of Puerto Rico. He ridiculed the leadership that has desperately tried to rebuild the island in the wake of these megastorms. “Let's get the facts straight. The Republicans know the storms that hit Puerto Rico over a year ago were not ordinary storms; they know these were historic catastrophes. We are talking about the deadliest disasters to hit American soil in over a century. We are talking about the worst power outage in American history. We are talking about 3,000 lives lost. Yet here we are, 18 months later, and the island hasn't recovered. “It is surreal that a disaster so awful has been met with a Presidential response that is so tepid and so heartless. It is surreal that our Republican colleagues go along with this and say we are not going to help Puerto Rico in the way that is needed. Billions in funding for recovery and mitigation efforts right now remain locked in the Treasury. Congress already appropriated $20 billion that the administration has not allocated. All we want to do is make sure the money is allocated. That is one of the things we want to do. “Are our Republican colleagues opposed to that? That is what it sounds like. Some of them say it is political. What is political is President Trump's saying no aid for Puerto Rico and having the Republicans jump in line, even those with many Puerto Ricans in their States. Make no mistake, we have reached this impasse because the President has said himself he opposes help for Puerto Rico, and the Republicans follow along. “Some of my colleagues from the other side came up with another shibboleth; that we opposed the House bill because it didn't provide funding for the Midwest. First of all, the House bill was aimed at disasters in 2018, not in 2019. Second, Senator Leahy offered an amendment that would have added funding for the Middle West and funding for Puerto Rico. What did the Republicans do? They blocked it anyway. “So this undoes their fantasy that the Democrats are opposed to aid for the Middle West. Senator Leahy and I will be offering an amendment that will give aid to the Midwest and to Puerto Rico. Let's see where our Republican colleagues stand. Will they block that too? “Yesterday's vote boiled down to a simple question: Do the Republicans believe the people of Puerto Rico deserve relief for their natural disasters as do all Americans? Do they believe the families of Puerto Rico--whatever you think of this elected official in Puerto Rico--deserve to be helped just like the families of the Midwest and California?”


crikey--2019-03-14--We are already feeling the effects of global warming

‘We are already feeling the effects of global warming’

How will climate change affect day-to-day life in Australia? Crikey spoke with Dr Andrew Glikson to find out.  Dr Andrew Glikson is an Earth and paleo-climate scientist at the Australian National University's Climate Change Institute. He has written exhaustively about climate change, the failures of policy in this area (and compliant dissemination of junk climate science through areas of politics and the media) which amount to, in his words, a "betrayal of the future".  Crikey spoke with Glikson about the concrete changes we will see in Australia thanks to this betrayal, and the possibility of real action and hope in that context.


dailyheraldchicago--2019-09-18--Could planting 1 trillion trees be the answer to global warming Study says yes

Could planting 1 trillion trees be the answer to global warming? Study says yes

In recent years, climate change has loomed like a dark specter over the globe, contributing to everything from gentrification in Miami to refugees fleeing drought and crop shortages in Guatemala.  But the urgency around the issue reached new heights in 2018 when the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated that rapid, "far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society" would be needed in order to drop carbon dioxide levels by 2030 and prevent catastrophic global warming.  Scientists have indeed proposed drastic measures -- just not in the way that you might think. In the same report, the U.N. suggests adding 2.5 billion acres of forest to the world could limit global warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050.  In other words: Responding to climate change will require planting new trees. A lot of them.  And now, the U.N. might have the data to back up its proposal.  In a study released in July in the journal Science, a group of researchers associated with the Crowther Lab in Switzerland found that global tree restoration to the tune of 223 million acres of canopy cover -- an area that's approximately the size of the United States -- is "our most effective climate change solution to date."  These trees would store 205 billion tons of carbon, or roughly two-thirds of the carbon that has been emitted "as a result of human activity since the Industrial Revolution," according to a news release.  Although some news reports have said this much forest restoration is the equivalent of roughly 1 trillion trees, this statistic is actually linked to an estimate from a 2015 study.  Jean-François Bastin, the Crowther Lab's study lead author, breaks down the 2019 analysis by email. "The idea was to estimate what tree cover could be expected when you removed the 'human factor,' i.e. what specific types of forest would naturally occur in the absence of other development, and where," he says. Bastin and his team used machine learning to build "a model to link tree cover with climate/soil/topography, based on 78,000 observations of tree cover in protected areas."  The researchers then projected the data further to estimate the "total potential tree cover of the planet," Bastin explains. Afterward, the team excluded land currently being used for urban settlements, croplands and existing forests, which yielded the total amount of land available for restoration.  The study includes a map showing how much tree coverage different parts of the globe can support; the top three areas include Russia, Canada and the U.S.  In many ways, the study's timing couldn't be more perfect, as it aligns with current global efforts around ecological restoration. One example is the Trillion Trees Vision, which seeks to restore 1 trillion trees by 2050. Another is the Bonn Challenge -- a partnership between the government of Germany and the U.N.'s International Union for Conservation of Nature that aims to restore 371 million acres of deforested land by 2020.  You might think that sounds pretty easy. Let's all roll up our sleeves and save the planet by planting one tree at a time -- right?  Some experts say the situation is a little more complicated, especially if most nations don't chip in to help.  "Implementation of forest restoration on the scale discussed in this paper is not as straightforward as it might seem," says Jim Hallett, chairman of the Society for Ecological Restoration.  "By 2018, there were commitments of over 420 million acres by 58 nations, which exceeds the Bonn Challenge goal. Current estimates indicate around 29 percent of the committed lands are now under restoration, but most of this work has been done by a few countries."  Although Hallett agrees forest restoration is important to addressing climate change, restoration alone likely will not be enough. It takes time, after all, to implement such big restoration projects and also for these trees to store carbon.  Other scientists question not only the practicality of the study's claims but also the study's very methodology.  "Many of the allegedly available restoration areas are clearly unsuitable for more trees than they currently support. If you look closely at the map, a large proportion of these areas are in regions where soils are permanently frozen," says Eike Luedeling, a climate change researcher and professor of horticultural sciences at the University of Bonn. "The methodology implicitly implies that carbon stock is proportional to canopy cover, i.e. ecosystems without trees contain no carbon. This is clearly false and strongly inflates the global estimate (of restoration)."  Jan Börner, Luedeling's colleague, is similarly skeptical. Börner says some areas being proposed for restoration already are being used for other purposes. Börner considers the study to be an "interesting academic exercise ... but as a (climate change) mitigation strategy proposal, it sends a misleading signal to the international climate policy debate."  Don't fret just yet. Both Bastin and Hallett emphasize the U.N. has declared 2021 to 2030 the "Decade on Ecosystem Restoration," which could spur nations to act quickly -- and some countries are already tackling the initiative head on.  "What we need is universal action: international agencies, NGOs (nongovernmental organizations), governments, all citizens -- anyone can be involved," says Bastian. "Local communities and small organizations may be especially effective. While they do not have the same reach as national agencies, they have the benefit of knowing what works best in their own backyards."  • This story originally ran on howstuffworks.com. It is republished here as part of the Daily Herald's partnership with Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.


drudgereport--2019-08-01--114 private jets for elite to talk global warming with GOOGLE

114 private jets for elite to talk 'global warming' with GOOGLE...

Who better than the actress herself to model off her...


eveningstandard--2019-02-15--School strike for climate change UK Greta Thunberg inspired students protest global warming by walk

School strike for climate change UK: Greta Thunberg inspired students protest global warming by walking out of school today

Students in 60 towns and cities across the UK are set to miss school and go on strike for a second time this Friday in a fight against climate change.  Inspired by Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, environmentally conscious students are calling for the government to take action on global warming.  Greta Thunberg is a 16-year-old schoolgirl from Sweden who has made headlines for her action against climate change.  In August 2018, Greta decided she would stop going to school on Fridays, choosing instead to picket outside the Swedish parliament (Rikstag) to raise awareness of global warming.  Her mission was to pressure the Swedish Government to pass legislation that would reduce carbon emissions in line with the Paris Agreement.  Since her strike action began, she has addressed world leaders at the COP24 United Nations climate chance summit and the World Economic Forum.  A coalition of students from Youth Strike 4 Climate, the UK Student Climate Network and the UK Youth Climate Coalition are striking to demand action from the Government.  The coalition says its students are "driven by an alarming lack of Government leadership on climate action over previous decades."  Demonstrations will take place in more than 64 places in the UK, including in London, Bristol, Cornwall and the Scottish Highlands.  Anna Taylor of the UK Student Climate Network said: “Young people in the UK have shown that we’re angry at the lack of government leadership on climate change.  "Those in power are not only betraying us, and taking away our future, but are responsible for the climate crisis that’s unfolding in horrendous ways around the world."  The second day of strike action is Friday, March 15, when students skip school to demonstrate against global warming.  This follows the first day of climate action in February, when thousands of students took part in marches up and down the UK.  Jake Woodier of Youth Strike 4 Climate said: “Youth voices are too often left out of the discussion when it comes to climate change.  "Our current trajectory is completely incompatible with a clean, safe environment not only for ourselves but future generations as well."  The coalition is calling on the Government to declare "a state of climate emergency" and educate the British public in the seriousness of global warming.  They are also demanding changes to the school curriculum which will include education about climate change.  The coalition wants young people to be included in decision-making and is also calling for the voting age to be lowered to 16.


eveningstandard--2019-05-17--Is plastic driving climate change Plastic production contributing to global warming almost twice as

Is plastic driving climate change? Plastic production contributing to global warming almost twice as much as aviation, research reveals

Whilst the devastating effects of plastic waste on the world's flora and fauna has been well-documented in recent years, the impact of plastic production, use and disposal on our climate has largely stayed out of the headlines – until now.  Research has uncovered that emissions from plastic in 2015 equated nearly 1.8 billion metric tons of CO2 and predicts demand will rise 22% over the next five years.  On this trajectory, the report forecasts that by 2050, emissions from plastic will climb to 17% of the global carbon budget.  The study also reveals that plastics account for 3.8% of global greenhouse gas emissions over their lifecycle - that's almost double the emissions from aviation.  The research, carried out by scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara and published by journal Nature Climate Change, claims to be "the first global assessment of the life cycle of greenhouse gas emissions from all plastics".  The report went on to describe how the global carbon footprint of plastics could be reduced through four key strategies:  “We thought that any one of these strategies should have curbed the greenhouse gas emissions of plastics significantly,” said study co-author Sangwon Suh, professor at UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management.  “We tried one and it didn’t really make much impact. We combined two, still the emissions were there. And then we combined all of them. Only then could we see a reduction in future greenhouse gas emissions from the current level.”


france24--2019-08-02--Scientists link Europe heat wave to man-made global warming

Jon Nazca, Reuters | People are silhouetted against the setting sun at "El Mirador de la Alemana" (The viewpoint of the German), as the summer's second heatwave hits Spain, in Malaga, southern Spain July 24, 2019.  The heat wave that smashed temperature records in Western Europe last month was made more likely and intensified by man-made climate change, according to a study published Friday.  The rapid study by a respected team of European scientists should be a warning of things to come, the report's lead author said.  "What will be the impacts on agriculture? What will the impacts on water?" said Robert Vautard of the Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace in France. "This will put really tension in society that we may not be so well equipped to cope with."  The report concluded that the heatwave in late July "was so extreme over continental Western Europe that the observed magnitudes would have been extremely unlikely without climate change."  In countries where millions of people sweltered through the heat wave, temperatures would have been 1.5 to 3 degrees Celsius (2.7 to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) lower in a world without human-induced climate change, the study said.  Global warming is also making such extreme heat more frequent, the study by experts from France, the Netherlands, Britain, Switzerland and Germany found.  The scientists said that the record temperatures recorded in France and the Netherlands could happen every 50-150 years in the world's current climate. Without "human influence on climate," the temperatures would likely happen less than once in 1,000 years.  Vautard said Europe needs to get used to such heat waves, which are likely to become more frequent and intense.  "This will go up and if we don't do anything about climate change, about emissions, these heat waves which today have an amplitude of 42 degrees, they will have three degrees more in 2050 so that is going to make 45 (degrees) roughly speaking," he told The Associated Press.  While the heat wave broke in Western Europe after a few days late last month, the extreme temperatures have since shifted north and are causing massive ice melts in Greenland and the Arctic.  The scientists calculated the odds of this type of heat occurring now and how often it would have happened in a world without man-made global warming and compared them. They created the simulations by using eight different sets of complex computer models.  The U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2016 studied this new scientific method of climate attribution and pronounced it valid.  Kathie Dello, a climate scientist from NC State University in North Carolina, said the study helps to pin the blame for the heat wave on climate change.  "If searching for a culprit for the intensity of these recent European heatwaves, climate change is the obvious culprit," Dello said in an email. "Attribution is just dusting for fingerprints. Climate change will continue to be a menace when it comes to extreme heat, making these events more likely and more intense."  Another expert not connected to the study, Celine Bonfils of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, said the findings are clear: "record hot weather events are becoming more likely, and human-induced climate change is causing this increase in heat wave frequency."  The new report agreed with their assessments, saying that every recent European heat wave that has been analyzed "was found to be made much more likely and more intense due to human-induced climate change."


freedombunker--2019-02-26--Scientists Are Hatching Mad Plans to Geoengineer Earth to Save Us from Global Warming

Harvard’s Gernot Wagner wants to save the world from global warming. His method? Develop a new type of plane that will fly more than 4,000 missions a year dumping particulates into the stratosphere.  Wagner and his colleague Wake Smith call the proposed plane “SAI Lofter (SAIL).” Anonymous individuals at “Airbus, Atlas Air, Boeing, Bombardier, GE Engines, Gulfstream, Lockheed Martin, NASA, Near Space Corporation, Northrup Grumman, Rolls Royce Engines, Scaled Composites, The Spaceship Company, and Virgin Orbit” provided input.  Estimates for SAIL’s design and operation seem sophisticated but are fabricated. Wagner and Smith admit, “No existing aircraft design—even with extensive modifications—can reasonably fulfill [their] mission.”  No doubt, Wagner and others will tell you careful calculations will limit global cooling to just the right degree.  Wagner and others believe that scientists can calculate how many particulates will be needed to cool the Earth to a desired temperature.  Wagner and Smith are not alone in their geoengineering dreams. As early as 2006, Paul J. Crutzen, Nobel laureate in chemistry, called for “stratospheric geoengineering research.” Harvard professors David Keith and Frank Keutsch hope to experiment via balloons spraying “a fine mist of materials such as sulfur dioxide, alumina, or calcium carbonate into the stratosphere.” Wagner, Keith, and Keutsch are all part of the Solar Geoengineering Research Program at Harvard.  Geoengineering is gaining global traction. Last fall, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report saying geoengineering could be used as an emergency “temporary remedial measure.”  Spraying aerosols in the stratosphere would “mimic what large volcanoes do.”  In 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted, spewing “millions of tons of dust, ash, and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, temporarily changing the world's climate and dropping global temperatures by as much as 3 degrees.” As the particulates moved around the global atmosphere, “1816 became the year without a summer for millions of people in parts of North America and Europe, leading to failed crops and near-famine conditions.”  Some scientists warn geoengineering will have unintended consequences.  No doubt, Wagner and others will tell you careful calculations will limit global cooling to just the right degree. Skeptics might conclude otherwise: scientists blinded by unlimited hubris are partnering with crony capitalists to threaten humanity.  To be sure, some scientists warn geoengineering will have unintended consequences. MIT’s Daniel Cziczo, an atmospheric scientist, warns that geoengineering could destroy the ozone layer. Without the ozone layer, photosynthesis would be difficult, the food chain would be destroyed, and life on Earth would perish. In this case, unintended consequences would be apocalyptic.  In his book The Fatal Conceit, F.A. Hayek observed, “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” Is Hayek’s statement equally applicable to scientists imagining they can safely modify the biosphere?  Regardless of your beliefs about global warming, Nassim Taleb’s “precautionary principle” would rule out plans altering the biosphere. Taleb writes:  In the late 1980s, outside Tucson, Arizona, scientists built a closed ecosystem (all food and water had to be obtained from inside the dome) to replicate the Earth’s biosphere. Eight humans resided in the biosphere for a short period of time. Not long into the experiment, project organizers had to open the sealed doors of Biosphere 2: “Oxygen levels got so low halfway through the first year that they had to put more in over fear for the safety of the Biosphere residents.”  "What they did learn, and in my opinion the single most important lesson, was just how little we truly understand Earth's systems."  John Adams, deputy director of Biosphere 2, clearly states the takeaway: "What they did learn, and in my opinion the single most important lesson, was just how little we truly understand Earth's systems." I suspect that Wagner won’t be calling Adams soon.  If you think Wagner’s plan to cool the atmosphere by mimicking the effects of volcanoes is bonkers, consider the Atlantropa project—"the craziest, most megalomaniacal scheme from the 20th century that you never heard of.”  After World War I, German engineer Herman Sörgel had a plan to prevent mass starvation in Europe. Sörgel called his plan the Atlantropa Project. The heart of the Atlantropa madness was to block the Atlantic Ocean from entering the Mediterranean by damming the Strait of Gibraltar. Deprived of a significant source of water flow, the Mediterranean would drain.  Sörgel imagined the dams would produce almost unlimited energy and the reclaimed land used for farming. World peace would reign when Europe and Africa were linked as a giant continent—Atlantropa.  Sörgel’s mad scheme had the enthusiast support of many expert engineers and the German public.  Without government support, Sörgel had no power to impose his crazy dream on others.  Yet, problems with Sörgel’s mad scheme were endless. An enormous amount of concrete would be required to build a dam across the Strait of Gibraltar. If the dam would fail, millions might die by floods. As for the reclaimed land, salt left behind on the seabed would prevent farming and turn the land into a desert.  Herman Sörgel’s crazy scheme is not so different from Gernot Wagner’s—both imagine they know how our biosphere works. In Sörgel’s case, dams would have altered the Gulf Stream with catastrophic global cooling the result.  Without government support, Sörgel had no power to impose his crazy dream on others. Humanity averted disaster when the Nazis rejected Sörgel’s engineered “utopia.” In another instance, the Soviets were not as lucky.  Consider the Aral Sea. The Aral Sea—once the fourth largest body of water on the planet—is now a vast wasteland that has shrunk to less than 25 percent of its former size.  The Aral Sea in Uzbekistan (formerly part of the Soviet Union) stands as a tragic monument to the environmental carnage that often occurs under socialism. How could this have happened? Was it a change in weather? No, the destruction of the Aral Sea was the consequence of the Soviet decision to divert waters that flowed into the Aral Sea to irrigate land for cotton farming.  In their book World Politics: International Politics on the World Stage, John Rourke and Mark Boyer write of the Aral Sea:  Then, beginning in the 1960s, Soviet agriculture demands and horrendous planning began to drain water from the sea and from the two great rivers that feed it (the Amu Darya from the north and the Syr Darya from the south) faster than the water could be replenished. The sea started to shrink rapidly. As it did, the level of its salinity rose, and by 1977 the catch from the once-important fishery had declined by over 75 percent. Still the water level continued to fall, as the sea provided irrigation for cotton fields and for other agricultural production. The same Soviet planning that brought the world the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster in Ukraine, stood by paralyzed as the Aral Sea began to disappear before the world’s eyes. Now, in reality, geographical name Aral Sea is a fiction, because it has shrunk in size and depth so much that a land bridge separates the so-called Greater Sea to the north from the Lesser Sea to the South. What was a single sea has lost 75 percent of its water and 50 percent of its surface area in the past 40 years. That is roughly equivalent to draining Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. The Uzbek town of Munak was once the Aral Sea’s leading port, with its fishermen harvesting the sea’s abundant catch. Now there are few fish, but even if there were many, it would not help the people of Munak. The town is now in the middle of a desert; the shoreline of the Lesser Sea is 50 miles away.  Let’s put all of this together. Human hubris and madness will always exist. Scientists can dream of controlling the uncontrollable, but they need an agent of coercion to implement their dangerous schemes. Their tool of coercion can only be government.


freedombunker--2019-04-02--Hey NYers Debate the Severity of Global Warming on April 15

Hey NYers: Debate the Severity of Global Warming on April 15

On Monday, April 15, the next Reason-sponsored Soho Forum, a monthly debate series, will engage the proposition, "There is little or no rigorous evidence that rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are causing dangerous global warming and threatening life on the planet."  Craig Idso, the founder and chairman of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, will take the affirmative position and Jeffrey Bennett, an astrophysicist and former visiting scholar at NASA, will argue the negative. The Soho Forum is an Oxford-style debate, meaning the audience is polled before and after the debate and the winner is the person who moves the most people to his side. Tickets must be purchased in advance and admission includes access to a cash bar and free buffet of light fare.  Use the discount code REASON and get 25 percent off.  Resolution: There is little or no rigorous evidence that rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are causing dangerous global warming and threatening life on the planet. Seating must be reserved in advance. Use REASON code to get 25 percent off!  All Soho Forums are released as Reason videos and podcasts. Go here for a full archive.


globalresearch--2019-09-07--Portents of 21st Century Global Warming

Portents of 21st Century Global Warming

Global Research has decided to publish different perspectives and competing viewpoints regarding Climate Change, with a view to promoting debate and critical analysis.  “We will be in a position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control that will most likely lead to the end of our civilization as we know it”…  “Now we probably don’t even have a future anymore, because that future was sold so that a small number of people could make unimaginable amounts of money. It was stolen from us every time you said that the sky was the limit, and that you only live once. You lied to us. You gave us false hope. You told us that the future was something to look forward to. And the saddest thing is that most children are not even aware of the fate that awaits us. We will not understand it until it’s too late. And yet we are the lucky ones. Those who will be affected the hardest are already suffering the consequences. But their voices are not heard.” Greta Thunberg  The extreme GHG and temperature rise rates since the mid-1970th raise questions over linear climate projections for the 21st century and beyond. Under a rise of CO equivalent reaching +500 ppm  and 3.0Wm-2  relative to 1750, the current rise rates of CO by 2.86 ppm  per  and recent global temperature rise rate (0.15-0.20°C per decade) since 1975 are leading to an abrupt shift in state of the terrestrial climate and the biosphere. By mid-21st century at >750 ppm CO-e climate tipping points indicated by Lenton et al. 2008 and Schellnhuber 2009 are likely to be crossed. Melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets has increased by a factor of more than 5 since 1979–1990. As the ice sheets and sea ice melt the albedo flip between reflective ice surfaces and dark infrared-absorbing water results in significant increase of radiative forcing and complete removal of Arctic sea ice would result in a forcing of about 0.7 Wm−2 (Hudson, 2011). The  confluence of climate events, including a breach of the circum-Arctic jet stream boundary and a polar-ward migration of climate zones at a rate of 56-111 km per decade, induce world-wide extreme weather events including bushfires, methane release from Arctic permafrost and sediments. For a climate sensitivity of 3±1.5°C per doubling of atmospheric CO , global warming has potentially reached between +2oC to +3oC above mean pre-industrial temperatures at a rate exceeding the fastest growth rate over the last 55 million years. As ice melt water flow into the oceans temperature polarities between warming continents and cooling tracts of ocean would further intensify extreme weather events under non-linear climate trajectories. The enrichment of the atmosphere in GHG, constituting a shift in state of the terrestrial climate, is predicted to delay the onset of the next glacial state by some 50,000 years.  The paleoclimate record suggests that no event since 55 million years ago, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), when global temperatures rose by more than +5 to  +8oC over a period of  ~20,000 years, with a subsequent warming period  of up to 200,000 years, has been as extreme as atmospheric disruption since the onset of the industrial age about 1750 AD (the Anthropocene), accelerating since 1975. During this period greenhouse gas levels have risen from ~280 ppm to above >410 ppm and to 496ppm CO2-equivalent (Figure 1), the increase of CO reaching near-47 percent above the original atmospheric concentration. However linear climate change projections are rare in the recent climate history (Figure 2) and linear future climate projections may not account for the effects of amplifying feedbacks from land and oceans. Given an Anthropocene warming rate faster by ~X200 times than the PETM (Figure 3), linear warming trajectories such as are projected by the IPCC may overlook punctuated tipping points, transient reversals and stadial events.  Figure 1. Growth of CO -equivalent level and the annual greenhouse gas Index (AGGI[1]). Measurements of CO to the 1950s are from (Keeling et al., 2008) and from air trapped in ice and snow above glaciers. Equivalent CO amounts (in ppm) are derived from the relationship between CO concentrations and radiative forcing from all long-lived greenhouse gases.  According to NOAA GHG forcing in 2018 has reached 3.101 Wm-2 relative to 1750 (CO =2.044Wm-2; CH = 0.512 Wm-2; N O = 0.199Wm-2; CFCs = 0.219Wm-2) with a CO -equivalent of 492 ppm (Figure 1). The rise in GHG forcing during the Anthropocene since about 1800 AD, intensifying since 1900 AD and sharply accelerating since about 1975, has induced a mean of  ~1.5oC over the continents above pre-industrial temperature, or >2.0oC when the masking role of aerosols is discounted, implying further warming is still in store.  According to Hansen et al. 2008 the rise in radiative forcing during the Last Glacial Termination (LGT –18,000 -11,000 years BP), associated with enhancing feedbacks, has driven GHG radiative forcing by approximately ~3.0 Wm-2 and a mean global temperature rise of ~4.50C (Figure 2), or, i.e. of similar  order as the Anthropocene rise since about 1900.  However the latter has been reached within a time frame at least X30 times shorter than the LGT, underpinning the extreme nature of current global warming.  Figure 2 (Hansen et al. 2008). Glacial-temperature and GHG forcing for the last 420,000 years based on the Vostok ice core, with the time scale expanded for the Anthropocoene. The ratio of temperature and forcing scales is 1.5°C per 1 W/m2. The temperature scale gives the expected equilibrium response to GHG change including slow feedback surface albedo change. Modern forcings include human-made aerosols, volcanic aerosols and solar irradiance.  The CO equivalent levels and radiative forcing levels constitute a rise from Holocene levels (~280 ppm CO ) to >410 ppm compared with Miocene-like levels (300-600 ppm CO ), at a rate reaching 2 to 3 ppm/year, within a century or so, driving the fastest temperature rise rate recorded since 55 million years ago (Figure 3).  Figure 3. A comparison between rates of mean global temperature rise during: (1) the last Glacial Termination (after Shakun et al. 2012); (2) the PETM (Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, after Kump 2011); (3) the late Anthropocene (1750–2016), and (4) an asteroid impact. In the latter instance temperature due to CO rise would lag by some weeks or months behind aerosol-induced cooling  Considering the transient mitigating albedo effects of clouds, seasonal land surface albedo, ice albedo, atmospheric aerosols including sulphur dioxide and nitrate, the potential rise of land temperature could have reached -0.4 to -0.9 Wm-2 in 2018, masking approximately 0.6 to 1.3oC potential warming once the short lived aerosol effect is abruptly reduced.  The fast rate of the Anthropocoene temperature rise compared to the LGT and PETM (Figure 3) ensues in differences in terms of the adaptation of flora and fauna to new conditions. The shift in state of the Earth’s climate is most acutely manifested in the poles, where warming leads to weakening of the jet stream boundaries which are breached by outflow of cold air fronts, such as the recent “Beast from the East” event,and penetration of warm air masses.  As the poles keep warming, to date by a mean of ~2.3oC, the shrinking of the ice sheets per year has accelerated by a factor of more than six fold (Figure 4). Warming of the Arctic is driven by the ice-water albedo flip, where dark sea-water absorbing solar energy alternates with high-albedo ice and snow, and by the weakening of the polar boundary and jet stream.  Greenland. The threshold of collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, retarded by hysteresis , is estimated in the range of 400-560 ppm CO , already transgressed  at the current 496 ppm CO (Figure 4). The Greenland mass loss increased from 41 ± 17 Gt/yr in 1990–2000, to 187 ± 17 Gt/yr in 2000–2010, to 286 ± 20 Gt/yr in 2010–2018, or six fold since the 1980s, or 80 ± 6 Gt/yr per decade, on average.  Antarctica. The greenhouse gas level and temperature conditions under which the East Antarctic ice sheet formed during the late Eocene 45-34 million years ago are estimated as ~800–2000 ppm andup to 4 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial values, whereas the threshold of collapse is estimated as 600 ppm CO  or even lower.  The total mass loss from the Antarctic ice sheet increased from 40 ± 9 Gt/yr in 1979–1990 to 50 ± 14 Gt/yr in 1989–2000, 166 ± 18 Gt/yr in 1999–2009, and 252 ± 26 Gt/yr in 2009–2017. Based on satellite gravity data the East Antarctic ice sheet is beginning to breakdown in places (Jones 2019), notably the Totten Glacier (Rignot et al., 2019), which may be irreversible. According to Mengel and Levermann (2014) the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica contains enough ice to raise global sea levels by 3–4 meters.  Figure 4. (A) New elevation showing the Greenland and Antarctic current state of the ice sheets accurate to a few meters in height, with elevation changes indicating melting at record pace, losing some 500 km3of ice per-year into the oceans; (B) Ice anomaly relative to the 2002-2016 mean for the Greenland ice sheet (magenta) and Antarctic ice sheet (cyan). Data are from GRACE; (C) the melting of sea ice 1978-2017, National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NCIDC)  The expansion of warm tropical zones and the polar-ward migration of subtropical and temperate climate zones are leading to a change in state in the global climate pattern. The migration of arid subtropical zones, such as the Sahara, Kalahari and central Australian deserts into temperate climate zones ensues in large scale droughts, such in inland Australia and southern Africa n the northern hemisphere expansion of the Sahara desert northward, manifested by heat waves across the Mediterranean and Europe (Figure 5)  Figure 5 (A) Migration of the subtropical Sahara climate zone (red spots) northward into the Mediterranean climate zone leads to warming, drying and fires over extensive parts of Spain, Portugal, southern France, Italy, Greece and Turkey, and to melting of glaciers in the Alps. Migration, Environment and Climate Change, International Organization for Migration Geneva – Switzerland (GMT +1); https://environmentalmigration.iom.int/maps  Figure 5 (B) Southward encroachment of Kalahari Desert conditions (vertical lines and red spots) leading to warming and drying of parts of southern Africa. https://environmentalmigration.iom.int/maps  Since the bulk of terrestrial vegetation has evolved under glacial-interglacial climate conditions, where GHG range between 180 – 300 ppm CO , Global warming is turning large parts of Earth into a tinderbox, ignited by natural and human agents. By July and August 2019, as fires rage across large territories, including the Amazon forest, dubbed the Planet’s lungs as it enriches the atmosphere in oxygen. When burnt the rainforest  becomes of source of a large amount of CO (Figure 6B), with some 72,843 fires in Brazil this year and extensive bushfires through Siberia, Alaska, Greenland, southern Europe, parts of Australia and elsewhere, the planet’s biosphere is progressively transformed. As reported:  Extensive cyclones, floods, droughts, heat waves and fires (Figure 6B) increasingly ravage large tracts of Earth. However, despite  its foundation in the basic laws of physics (the black body radiation laws of Planck, Kirchhoff’ and Stefan Boltzmann), as well as empirical observations around the world by major climate research bodies (NOAA, NASA, NSIDC, IPCC, World Meteorological Organization, Hadley-Met, Tindale, Potsdam, BOM, CSIRO and others), the anthropogenic origin, scale and pace of climate change remain subject to extensively propagated denial and untruths.  Figure 6.(A) Extreme weather events around the world 1980-2018, including earthquakes, storms, floods, droughts. Munich Re-insurance. (B) A satellite infrared  image of South America fires (red dots) during July and August, 2019, NASA.  Whereas strict analogies between Quaternary and Anthropocene climate developments is not possible, elements of the glacial-interglacial history are relevant for an understanding of current and future climate events. The rise of total greenhouse gas (GHG), expressed as CO – , to 496 ppm CO -e (Figure 1),within lessthan a century represents an extreme atmospheric event. It raised GHG concentrations from Holocene levels to the range of the Miocene (34–23 Ma) when CO level was between 300 and 530 ppm. As the glacial sheets disintegrate, cold ice-melt water flowing into the ocean ensue in large cold water pools, a pattern recorded following peak interglacial phases over thelast 450,000 years, currently  manifested by the growth of cold regions in north Atlantic Ocean south of Greenland and in the Southern Ocean fringing Antarctica (Figure 7).  Warming of +3oC to +4oC above pre-industrial levels, leading to enhanced ice-sheet melt, would raise sea levels by at least 2 to 5 meters toward the end of the century and, delayed by hysteresis, likely by 25 meters in the longer term. Golledge et al. (2019) show meltwater from Greenland will lead to substantial slowing of the Atlantic overturning circulation, while meltwater from Antarctica will trap warm water below the sea surface, increasing Antarctic ice loss. Whereas the effect of low-density ice melt water on the surrounding oceans is generally not included in many models, depending on amplifying feedbacks, prolonged Greenland and Antarctic melting and consequent cooling of surrounding ocean sectors as well as penetration of freezing air masses through weakened polar boundaries may have profound effect on future climate change trajectories (Figure 8).  Figure 7(A)Global warming map (NASA 2018). Note the cool ocean regions south of Greenland and along the Antarctic. Credits: Scientific Visualization Studio/Goddard Space Flight Center; (B) 2012 Ocean temperatures around Antarctica (NASA 2012).  Climate projections for 2100-2300 by the IPCC AR5 Synthesis Report, 2014 portray predominantly linear to curved models of greenhouse gas, global temperatures and sea level changes. These models however appear to take limited account of amplifying feedbacks from land and ocean and of the effects of cold ice-melt on the oceans. According to Steffen et al. (2018)  Linear temperature models appear to take limited account of the effects on the oceans of ice melt water derived from the large ice sheets, including the possibility of a significant stadial event such as already started in oceanic tracts fringing Greenland and Antarctica (Figure 7) and modelled by Hansen et al, (2016). In the shorter to medium term sea level rises would ensue from the Greenland ice sheet (6-7 meter sea level rise) and West Antarctic ice sheet melt (4.8 meter sea level rise). Referring to major past stadial events, including the 8200 years-old Laurentian melt and the 12.7-11.9 younger dry as event, a protracted breakdown of parts of the Antarctic ice sheet could result in major sea level rise and extensive cooling of southern latitudes and beyond, parallel with warming of tropical and mid-latitudes (Figure 8) (Hansen et al.. 2016). The temperature contrast between polar-derived cold fronts and tropical air masses is bound to lead to extreme weather events, echoed among other in Storms of my grandchildren (Hansen, 2010).  Figure 8. (A) Model Surface-air temperature (oC) for 2096 relative to 1880–1920 (Hansen et al 201 6). The projection betrays major cooling of the North Atlantic Ocean, cooling of the circum-Antarctic Ocean and further warming in the tropics, subtropics and the interior of continents; (B) Modeled surface-air temperatures (°C) to 2300 AD relative to 1880–1920 for several ice melt rate scenarios, displaying a stadial cooling event at a time dependent on the ice melt doubling time (Hansen et al., 2016). Courtesy Prof James Hansen.  Within and beyond 2100-2300 projections (Figure 8A, B) lies an uncharted climate territory, where continuing melting of the Antarctic ice sheet, further cooling of neighboring sectors of the oceans and climate contrasts with GHG-induced warming of land areas (Figure 8A), ensue in chaotic climate disruptions (Figure 8B). Given the thousands to tens of thousands years longevity of atmospheric greenhouse gases (Solomon et al., 2009; Eby et al 2009), the onset of the next ice age is likely to be delayed on the scale of tens of thousands of years (Berger and Loutre, 2002) through an exceptionally long interglacial period (Figure 9).  Figure 9. Simulated Northern Hemisphere ice volume (increasing downward) for the period 200,000 years BP to 130,000 years in the future, modified after a part of Berger and Loutre 2002. Time is negative in the past and positive in the future. For the future, three CO scenarios were used: last glacial-interglacial values (solid line), a human-induced concentration of 750 ppm (dashed line), and a constant concentration of 210 ppm inducing a return to a glacial state (dotted line).  As conveyed by leading scientists “Climate change is now reaching the end-game, where very soon humanity must choose between taking unprecedented action or accepting that it has been left too late and bear the consequences” (Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber)…“We’ve reached a point where we have a crisis, an emergency, but people don’t know that … There’s a big gap between what’s understood about global warming by the scientific community and what is known by the public and policymakers”( James Hansen).  Climate scientists find themselves in a quandary similar to medical doctors, committed to help the ill yet need to communicate grave diagnoses. How do scientists tell people the current spate of extreme weather events, including cyclones, devastating islands from the Caribbean to the Philippine, floods devastating coastal regions and river valleys from Mozambique to Kerala, Pakistan and Townsville, and fires burning extensive tracts of the living world can only intensify in a rapidly warming world? How do scientists tell the people that their children are growing into a world where survival under a mean temperatures higher than +2 degrees Celsius (above pre-industrial temperatures) is likely to be painful and, in some parts of the world, impossible, let alone under +4 degrees Celsius projected by the IPCC?  Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.  Dr Andrew Glikson, Earth and Paleo-climate science, Australia National University (ANU) School of Anthropology and Archaeology, ANU Planetary Science Institute, ANU Climate Change Institute, Honorary Associate Professor, Geothermal Energy Centre of Excellence, University of Queensland. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.  [1] The index uses 1990 as a baseline year with a value of 1.  The index increased every year since 1979. https://www.co2.earth/annual-ghg-index-aggi  [2] where a physical property lags behind changes in the effect causing it


globalresearch--2019-09-25--Dr Gottschalks World War II Heat Bump Did the War Contribute to Air Pollution and Global Warmin

Dr. Gottschalk’s “World War II Heat Bump”: Did the War Contribute to Air Pollution and Global Warming?

On January 19, 2017 a New York Times front-page story, “For Third Year, the Earth in 2016 Set Heat Record,” featured a complex NOAA chart showing multiple global temperature readings taken from 1880 to 2016.  Studying the front-page chart, Harvard physicist Dr. Bernard Gottschalk noticed an intriguing anomaly, a brief but suggestive ‘bump’ in temperatures that coincided with WW2 (1939-1945).  Relative to the big sweeping curve of climbing temperatures over the prior hundred years, the bump was not particularly noticeable, at least to the average person.  But it was noticeable to Gottschalk’s expert eye. He decided to see whether or not the WW2 temperature bump was a robust feature of the NOAA data. He applied what statisticians call ‘curve fitting’ techniques and ‘parametric analysis’ to eliminate the scatter in the data and discern the forest from the trees. He submitted his results to Cornell University’s online archive [Type here] 2 of scientific pre-publication articles in March 2017. Here is what Gottschalk’s curve-fitted ‘bump’ looks like.  Gottschalk showed the rise-and-fall behaviors common to eight of the NOAA data-set measurements, four land-based and four ocean-based, during WW2.  Of the possible explanations for the WW2 heat bump, Gottschalk concluded the “simplest and most likely” one was that it was “a consequence of human activity.” [1]  The following year, in 2018, a colleague showed Gottschalk’s online paper to geoscientist J Marvin Herndon. Herndon was immediately struck by the WW2 heat bump. If CO2 had caused the sudden rise in temperatures in 1939, their abrupt fall in late 1945 and 1946 could not have happened, because CO2 has a very long residence time in the atmosphere. Once in the atmosphere, CO2 and its presumed heat effects don’t suddenly disappear.  Moreover, ice core data showed “no significant increase in CO2 during the war years 1939– 1945.” [2] What then could have ramped up the heat in 1939-40 and subsequently caused it to plummet in 1946, after the war had ended?  Gottschalk’s WW2 temperature bump was a provocative anomaly in the 136-year global heat record, especially given the ‘consensus’ that anthropogenic CO2 is the primary cause of global warming.  Herndon surmised that unlike greenhouse gases, air pollution particles have a short residence time in the lower atmosphere, or troposphere, time measured in days and weeks. If war-related particulate air pollution had caused the heat bump, then Earth’s surface temperatures could be expected to fall abruptly with the cessation of global hostilities. As in fact happened.  Herndon decided “to consider the broader activities of WW2,” especially the role of particulate matter that might act to alter Earth’s delicate energy balance. Particulate air pollution is comprised of small, including microscopically small, solid or liquid particles light enough to float in air. Aerosols are particulates that are immersed in a gas or liquid and are produced by fires, fossil fuel use, agriculture, industry, mining, marine-aviation-and-vehicular transport (especially diesel), unpaved roads, construction and demolition, among other human activities, all producing dust (vehicular road traffic), fly ash (coal), soot (coal and diesel), smoke (forest fires), and fumes (mining and metallurgy).  Relative to earlier years, WW2 produced significantly more amounts of particulate aerosols.  Early in the war the Allies, possessing superior airpower and led by Great Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF), developed the practice of ‘area bombing’—to an extent already carried out by Japan in China, and by Germany in Poland—that deliberately targeted civilian and non-military zones for wholesale demolition. [4] In early March 1945, to take but one notable example, [Type here] 4 hundreds of US B-29 Superfortress bombers dropped 1,700 tons of incendiary explosives over Tokyo, creating a firestorm that burned for days, incinerating 16 square miles and killing as many as 100,000 humans, all in one blow. The near-total instantaneous destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki five months later ended the war in the Pacific. By war’s end in 1945, the Allied Forces had dropped over 2.7 million tons of bombs in Europe alone, creating maelstroms of smoke, debris, dust, and soot, with fires that could rage for days.  Coal was still the world’s primary energy source during WW2, essential to iron and steel production, electricity generation, and rail transport, among other uses fundamental to the conduct of the war. The United States, the Allies’ industrial workhorse, consumed 12.5 quadrillion Btu of coal in 1940. By 1945 US coal consumption had grown to 16 quadrillion Btu. By 1949 US coal consumption had plummeted 25 percent to 12 quadrillion Btu—less than was consumed at the war’s outset. [5]  Herndon noted that “the aerosolized particulates settled to the ground after the war, Earth radiated its excess trapped energy, and global warming abruptly subsided. But only for a brief time, as particulate pollution began to rise again from ramped-up post-WW2 industrial growth, initially in Europe and Japan, and later in China, India, and the rest of Asia, dramatically increasing worldwide aerosol particulate pollution.” [6] Global warming soon resumed its steeply rising course.  Lacking “reliable, historical, global aerosol-particulate data” to measure the growth of particulate pollution during WW2, Herndon decided to use proxies “to demonstrate the reasonableness of the proposition that increases in aerosolized particulates over time is principally responsible for the global warming increase.” [7] To Gottschalk’s figure (see Figure 3 above) he added three “relative-value” proxy curves illustrating three major industrial sources of air pollution: global coal and oil production, and global aviation fuel consumption. When burned, these fuels emit both gases and aerosol particulates.  With Herndon’s first peer-reviewed paper on the subject published in September 2018, Gottschalk’s WW2 heat bump due to “human activity” launched a serious scientific case for particulate pollution as the primary, unheralded anthropogenic cause of global warming.  The question that needed to be answered was: How do particulate aerosols alter Earth’s delicate thermal balance? How do they heat the planet?  To maintain its thermal balance, “Earth must return to space virtually all the energy it receives from the sun as well as the energy it produces internally.” [8] The two most important ways Earth thermoregulates are via convection, the “mass-transport of energy” in the lower atmosphere or troposphere, and via infrared radiation from Earth’s surface. According to Herndon, the climate science community focuses almost exclusively on the role of radiation transport, and generally “fails to understand the significant role atmospheric convection plays” in the removal of heat from Earth’s surface. [9]  The troposphere is the lowest region of Earth’s atmosphere, the region where the air mixes and roils, where 99 percent of Earth’s water vapor is, and where the weather happens. It is also the region where convection—the uptake of Earth’s surface heat—occurs.  Convection is a natural, ongoing, and constant process whereby the heat from Earth’s surface is transported to the upper troposphere, and from there eventually back into space. It is driven by the temperature difference between the upper and lower surface layers of air in the troposphere. (The Greek tropo means turning or changing.) Hotter, lighter surface air rises and colder, denser air falls, driving the atmosphere’s turbulence, which allows heat to escape. This difference in temperatures between layers causes the natural disturbance that is the troposphere’s signature characteristic, its continually changing movement of air, moisture, and weather.  Convection’s efficiency depends on what scientists call the ‘adverse temperature gradient’, meaning the amount or degree of difference between Earth’s surface atmospheric temperature and its upper troposphere temperature. The less difference, the less adverse temperature gradient. The less adverse temperature gradient, the less efficient the removal of Earth’s surface heat by convection.  To show how convection works, Herndon described a simple classroom-demonstration experiment in which he used “a 4 liter beaked-beaker, nearly filled with distilled water, and heated on a regulated hot plate.” As an indicator of convection, celery seeds were added to be “dragged along by convective motions in the water.” Due to the constantly maintained temperature difference between the heated bottom and the cooler top of the beaker, with heat venting out the top, a constant, regular circulation of the fluid was established, signaled by the movement of the seeds. “When stable convection was obtained a ceramic tile was placed atop the beaker to retard heat loss, thereby increasing the temperature at the top relative to that at the bottom, thus decreasing the adverse temperature gradient.” [10]  The whole process was videotaped. [11]  The video shows a dramatic reduction in convection when the lid is placed on top of the beaker, with a “markedly” rapid decrease in the movement of the beaker’s celery seeds, “demonstrating the principle that reducing the adverse temperature gradient decreases convection” and warms the planet. In other words, don’t place an aerosols-pollution ‘lid’ on the open tropospheric air beaker if you want Earth to thermoregulate properly. There is a common misunderstanding, both among climate scientists and the press covering future geoengineering schemes, that air particulate pollution acts to shut out sunlight and cool the atmosphere. This does in fact happen when particulates are placed deep in the stratosphere—high above the troposphere, which itself only extends to about 10 km or 6-7 miles above sea level. We have seen the example of the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption, when the Philippine volcano “ejected 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide…more than 1 cubic mile of material that rose in an ash cloud 22 miles into the air” deep inside the stratosphere “and caused global temperatures to drop from 1991 to 1993 by about 1º F (0.5º C).” [12].  But air particulate pollution is primarily a tropospheric phenomenon, not a stratospheric one.  Indian scientists, measuring the heating rates of the lower atmosphere over the Indian Ocean, found that the “atmospheric heating rate…due to aerosol over the tropical Indian Ocean was many times larger than that due to CO2.”[14] Coal fly ash is a known efficient radiation absorber, prominently due to its components of iron, iron oxides such as hematite and magnetite, carbon and carbon black, as well as other elements (e.g., aluminum, magnesium). India is heavily dependent on coal and mortally dependent on its monsoon. Recently Indian researchers used state-of-the-art instruments to measure the effects of pollution particulates such as black carbon on the movement of the monsoon. They discovered a “higher amount” of black carbon particulates that “can disturb the normal upward movement of moist air” because they heat the atmosphere and reduce convection. [15]  The adverse thermal gradient directly affects the lives of billions of human beings. And not only in Asia, but the whole world.  “The one generalization that can now be made,” Herndon asserts in his sixth and most recently published paper, “is that virtually all tropospheric aerosol particulates, including cloud droplets and their aerosol components, absorb short- and long-wave solar radiation, and absorb longwave radiation from Earth’s surface.” [16]  When millions of tons of heat-absorbing particulate pollution in the form of soot, dust, smoke, and coal fly ash are deposited in the troposphere they heat the surrounding air masses and, acting as a lid on the atmospheric ‘beaker’, they directly lower the adverse temperature gradient between Earth’s surface and the troposphere’s upper layer. Such interference directly reduces atmospheric convection and allows incident solar radiation to build up and warm the planet.  Herndon concludes: “The lowering of the adverse temperature gradient in the lower atmosphere is the primary way global particulate pollution causes global warming.” [17]  Over the last two decades geoengineering has been much discussed and hyped as a possible anthropogenic antidote to human-caused CO2 global warming. The two have been coupled as a single problem/solution conundrum in the minds of scientific and political elites at least since the National Academy of Sciences’ massive 1992 report Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming. [18] The ‘the Pinatubo option’ of ameliorating CO2-caused heat by spraying millions of tons of sulfur dioxide or aluminum nanoparticulates into the stratosphere, what geoengineers call ‘stratospheric radiation management’, is their currently favored solution to the problem of global warming. [19] And political elites are peering over the engineers’ shoulders with close attention to the political intricacies of eventual implementation. [20]  The problems with this ‘solution’ are manifold and obvious, yet underappreciated. The problem posed, for instance, by aerosolized pollution nanoparticulates to the stratospheric ozone layer, which shields the entire biosphere from ultraviolet radiation, though mentioned, is rarely stressed. Even in the dry stratosphere, which is far less turbulent than the moisture-laden troposphere, gravity operates. Particulates precipitate out, falling first into the troposphere where the weather occurs in form of rain and drought (among other events), and from the troposphere onto agricultural fields and gardens, into reservoirs and lakes, into the ocean, and into vertebrate lungs.  Even though the residence time of particulates in the stratosphere is measured in years (one, two, or three), not days and weeks, to keep ‘managing’ incoming solar radiance the stratospheric pollutant shield will have to be continuously renewed, and aerosols more or less constantly sprayed, at least for decades, and possibly longer. [21]  Leaving the long-term effects on local, regional, and global weather systems aside, once in the troposphere aerosols have mortal effects. Indeed, humanity and all other living beings would have to adapt to unprecedented levels of invisible aerosol pollution whose health effects are known [22] but grossly underappreciated. Last October the head of WHO warned that “the simple act of breathing is killing 7 million people a year and harming billions more.” He added that “air pollution now causes more deaths annually than tobacco,” and that “over 90% of the world’s population suffers toxic air…with profound impacts on the health of people, especially children.” [23].  There is, as readers of Herndon’s [24] or my work [25] know, another form of geoengineering. It takes place in the lower atmosphere, and constitutes a different, covert kind of enterprise, conducted by the military and its subcontractors, whose purpose can only be speculated upon.  What can no longer be denied, however, is that deep state tropospheric geoengineering’s principal and most significant result is to warm the planet.  In the early post-WW2 years John von Neumann, one the last century’s most influential scientists and mathematicians, claimed that “using computer-generated predictions…weather and climate systems ‘could be controlled, or at least directed, by the releases of perfectly practical amounts of energy’.” [26] Humans now possess those ‘perfectly practical amounts of energy’ in the form of globally dispersed ionospheric heaters and electrically conducting aerosols.  Toward the end of his life, von Neumann pronounced: “All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control.” [27]  Von Neumann spoke for a community whose power has grown steadily over the last 60 years, the community Eisenhower warned of in his Farewell Address. The weather and the climate are preeminent examples of ‘unstable processes’ whose complexities, though huge, do not appear to daunt von Neumann’s scientific and military heirs.  Meanwhile, our civilization is profoundly dependent on fossil-fuel energy. Virtually all official sources indicate that we will remain heavily dependent on fossil fuels for at least another generation. Given our dependency, there are two reasons for optimism.  One, it is technically more feasible to reduce particulate air pollution than to reduce carbon dioxide.  Two, if the NOAA WW2 temperature data as interpreted by Gottschalk and by Herndon is correct, then reducing particulate emissions will have an immediate beneficial effect on global warming.  Ian Baldwin is an environmentalist and co-founder of Chelsea Green Publishing Company in Vermont. He has written on geoengineering issues  under the rubric “Our Geoengineering Age” at www.vermontindependent.net.”  [1] Bernard Gottschalk, “Global surface temperatures trends and the effect of World War II: a parametric analysis (long version),” arXiv, March 19, 2017; expanded October 15, 2018. http://arxiv-export-lb.library.cornell.edu/pdf/1703.09281. Accessed Sep 06, 2019.  [2] J Marvin Herndon & Mark Whiteside, “Further Evidence that Particulate Pollution is the Principal Cause of Global Warming: Humanitarian Considerations,” Journal of Geography, Environment and Earth Science International, 21 (1), May 08, 2019. http://www.journaljgeesi.com/index.php/JGEESI/article/view/30117. Accessed Sep 06, 2019.  [3] J Marvin Herndon, “Air Pollution, Not Greenhouse Gases: The Principal Cause of Global Warming,” Journal of Geography, Environment and Earth Science International, 17 (2), September 22, 2018. http://www.journaljgeesi.com/index.php/JGEESI/article/view/11231. Accessed Sep 06, 2019.  [5] “History of Energy Consumption in the United States, 1775–2009,” US Energy Information Administration, February 09, 2011. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=10. Accessed Sep 06, 2019.  [6] J Marvin Herndon “Role of Atmospheric Convection in Global Warming,” Journal of Geography, Environment and Earth Science International, 19 (4), March 13, 2019. http://www.journaljgeesi.com/index.php/JGEESI/article/view/30091. Accessed Sep 06, 2019.  [8] J Marvin Herndon, “Fundamental Climate Science Error: Concomitant Harm to Humanity and the Environment,” Journal of Geography, Environment and Earth Science International, 18 (3), December 28, 2018. http://journaljgeesi.com/index.php/JGEESI/article/view/28790. Accessed Sep 06, 2019.  [13] Ian Baldwin, “Origins of the ‘Climate Change’ Threat to National Security—and the Geoengineering Response,” vermontindependent.net, June 13, 2017. https://vermontindependent.net/origins-of-the-climate-change-threat-to-national-securityand-the-geoengineering-response-our-geoengineering-age-part-6/. Accessed Sep 06, 2019.  [14] M V Ramana et al, “Albedo, atmospheric solar absorption and heating rate measurements with stacked UAVs,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 133 (629), September 18, 2007. https://www.academia.edu/25247234/Albedo_atmospheric_solar_absorption_and_heating_ra te_measurements_with_stacked_UAVs. Accessed Sep 06, 2019.  [15] Shamitaksha Talukdar et al, “Influence of Black Carbon Aerosol on the Atmospheric Instability,” Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 124 (10), April 29,2019. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2018JD029611. Accessed Sep 06, 2019.  [16] J Marvin Herndon, “Geophysical Consequences of Tropospheric Particulate Heating: Further Evidence that Anthropogenic Global Warming is Principally Caused by Particulate Pollution,” Journal of Geography, Environment and Earth Science International, 22 (4), August 19, 2019. http://journaljgeesi.com/index.php/JGEESI/article/view/30157. Accessed Sep 06, 2019.  [19] Douglas G MacMartin, Katharine L Ricke & David W Keith, “Solar Geoengineering as Part of an Overall Strategy for Meeting the 1.5 Degrees Celsius Paris Target,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, April 02, 2018. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rsta.2016.0454. Accessed Sep 07, 2019.  [22] Mark Whiteside & J Marvin Herndon, “Geoengineering: The Deadly New Global ‘Miasma’,” Journal of Advances in Medicine and Medical Research, 29 (12), June 20, 2019. http://www.journaljammr.com/index.php/JAMMR/article/view/30151. Accessed Sep 06, 2019.  [23] Damian Carrington & Matthew Taylor “Air pollution is the ‘new tobacco’, warns WHO head,” The Guardian, October 27, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/27/air-pollution-is-the-new-tobaccowarns-who-head. Accessed Sep 06, 2019.


globalresearch--2019-12-17--Huge Climate Victory! Denmark Mandates Global Warming Cure…By Law!

Friday, Dec 6, 2019, saw the most important victory to date in the battle against Global Warming. Denmark’s “Climate Act” will entirely revamp Denmark’s climate policy – by law- and thrust it onto the world’s centre stage by showcasing the only effective political solution: Changing the “system itself.”  Eight out of the ten parties in the Danish Parliament agreed on the new national Climate Act that mandates binding targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 70 per cent (compared to the 1990 level).  2030, not the belayed 2050, is the target date for tangible reductions. In a world-first, Danish law requires consideration of methane gas, consumption, and imported emissions along with CO2.Denmark has also eliminated the trickery of Carbon credits while a new expert body of climate scientists will be placed with the newly formed Climate Council. They and the Climate Minister must annually submit to a parliamentary progress review. The first of two five year plans of action are now being developed for approval. Also, a new Committee for the Green Transformation will ensure that climate considerations are taken into account in every major political decision and include 13 climate partnerships with Denmark’s leading private sector organizations. The aim of this historic legislation is a path to sustainable solutions of the future.  Better, the Danish law requires it to take a leadership role in international climate engagement. Every year it will present to the world its “Climate Action Programmes” that showcase concrete political initiatives to decarbonize every Danish civic sector.  This is a victory for Denmark and also climate activists. No longer can other world leaders mitigate and marginalize Global Warming by using the tricks of denial and delay. Nor can they cast aside factual science as a mere conspiracy. One small nation, Denmark, has now vindicated-forever- climate activism and in turn, vilified the mercenary deniers of the obvious. Denmark has thus become the world’s first nation to legitimize the rebellion against Global Warming.  Said Minister for Climate, Dan Jørgensen, “We hope Denmark can inspire other countries to follow suit.”  Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.  Brett Redmayne-Titley has published over 180 in-depth articles over the past ten years for news agencies worldwide. Many have been translated and republished. On-scene reporting from important current events has led to his many multi-part exposes on such topics as the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, NATO summit, Keystone XL Pipeline, Porter Ranch Methane blow-out, Hizbullah in Lebanon, Erdogan’s Turkey and many more. He can be reached at: live-on-scene ((at)) gmx.com. Prior articles can be viewed at his archive: www.watchingromeburn.uk  Featured image is from the author


hitandrun--2019-04-02--Hey NYers Debate the Severity of Global Warming on April 15


mercurynews--2019-01-28--Letter Action not awareness needed in global warming

Letter: Action, not awareness, needed in global warming

An article by John Schwartz of the New York Times in the Jan. 23 edition of the Mercury News summarized recent polls indicating that 73 percent of Americans now understand that global warming is happening, and 69 percent are worried about it.  This is great news. But awareness is one thing; action is another. In the Bay Area, we are fortunate to have access to Community Choice Aggregation programs, such as Silicon Valley Clean Energy and Peninsula Clean Energy, which buy electricity from renewable sources and provide it directly to customers.  Switching over to these programs is automatic, and a higher percentage of renewable power is provided than is available from PG&E and at a lower price. However, for the cost of a large latte each month, you can sign up for 100 percent renewable power.  Letter: Ross has no idea about government loans  On a personal level, this is one of best actions we can take to combat global warming.  Submit your letter to the editor via this form   Read more Letters to the Editor


newsbusters--2019-03-17--NBC CBS Promote Teens Skipping School to Protest Global Warming

NBC, CBS Promote Teens Skipping School to Protest Global Warming

On Friday evening, the NBC Nightly News caught up with CNN in highlighting a couple of teenage environmental activists who are promoting an alarmist agenda against global warming while encouraging students to skip school to pressure adults into taking action on the issue. The CBS Evening News also gave the protests a 17-second brief.  Anchorman Lester Holt introduced the one-sided report: "Students took to the streets today in this country and far beyond, calling on our leaders to do more to protect the planet." No one makes the middle-schoolers prove they got an A in Science.  Correspondent Kelly Cobiella began: "Across America and around the globe, students today went on strike for the climate. ... Alexandria Villasenor is just 13 years old, and has been on strike for nearly four months after seeing Swedish teen, Greta Thunberg, calling out world leaders."  Then came a clip of 15-year-old environmental activist Greta Thunberg speaking at an event: "You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes."  Cobiella then returned to Villasenor's activism as the NBC reporter continued: "Alexandria helped organize the protests across the U.S."  The NBC correspondent added: "And to the adults who say these kids should stay in school?" The seventh grader oozed with disdain: "Adults didn't do anything to prevent this, so they shouldn't be telling us that. If enough youth keep striking, going out into the streets, having civil disobedience, we'll get the action that's needed."  Cobiella concluded: "Whatever it takes, they say, to save their future."  How much might that be? NBC didn't report "Their demands are uncompromising: Nations must commit to cutting fossil-fuel emissions in half in the next 10 years to avoid catastrophic global warming." How drastic will the "solutions" have to be on the American people and the American economy? Apparently, all that matters is striking a pose for the TV cameras.  Over on the CBS Evening News, anchorman Jeff Glor read a brief, hyping the number of participants (on behalf of leftist groups, your usual "organizers estimate" hype):


npr--2019-01-22--Concern About Global Warming Among Americans Spikes Report Says

Concern About Global Warming Among Americans Spikes, Report Says  In 2018, Americans watched as California towns were incinerated by fires, hurricanes devastated coastal communities and a government report sounded the alarm about the impacts of a changing climate.  All those factors contributed to significant changes in perceptions of global warming in the U.S., according to the authors of a new public opinion survey.  The proportion of Americans who said global warming is "personally important" to them jumped from 63 percent to 72 percent from March to December of last year.  There has also been an 8-percent rise in the number of Americans who are "very worried" about global warming – 29 percent said they feel that way, while 40 percent said they are "somewhat worried."  And 56 percent of Americans said their family will be harmed by global warming.  "Americans have, unfortunately, had far more experience with what climate change looks like," researcher Anthony Leiserowitz told NPR. He led the team behind the survey, "Climate Change in the American Mind," which was a collaboration between Yale and George Mason Universities.  He said the biggest surprise for researchers was how Americans' worry about global warming spiked between their surveys in March and December of last year.  "It really does indicate that Americans are increasingly seeing this not as a distant problem, but as something that's here and now," Leiserowitz said.  While scientists often can't tie specific weather events to climate change, global warming is leading to warmer oceans and hotter summers – the kinds of conditions that exacerbate the high-profile storms and fires that are impacting the U.S.  A major federal government climate assessment released in November painted a stark picture of the costs and dangers the country faces as global temperatures continue to climb: From billions of dollars in infrastructure damage and disaster response funds, to the spread of disease and rising seas. Fifty-four percent of Americans said they haven't yet felt the effects of global warming, but that number is at its lowest level in a decade.  The survey, released Tuesday, also took stock of how Americans see the role of humans in global climate change. Sixty-two percent of those surveyed said global warming is mostly caused by humans – which is what science has shown. Twenty-three percent of Americans said it is "mostly caused by natural changes in the environment," the lowest number of people to say so since the survey began in 2008.  Leiserowitz said he thinks the survey also shows the impact of media coverage on public impressions of climate change.  "The only way most Americans even know about these issues is because of coverage," Leiserowitz explained. "So when the media does not report this, it is literally out of sight, out of mind. But when the media does report it, it becomes salient."  The presence of climate change in public debate – and in Americans' consciousness – has both grown and faded over the years. A look back at Leiserowitz's data from the last decade shows that Americans' concern about the issue has only recently matched or surpassed public opinion in 2008.  Leiserowitz explained that a combination of media (Al Gore's climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth and the climate change disaster film The Day After Tomorrow) and politics (John McCain was vocal about the threats of global warming) drove increased levels of awareness and concern about the problem at that time. He said their research shows the subsequent rise of the conservative tea party – which sidelined concerns about climate change — erased those gains.  The survey says that 48 percent of Americans feel hopeful about global warming, while 51 percent feel helpless. Just 14 percent of Americans think it is too late to do anything about it.


powerlineblog--2019-01-22--Global Warming The Big Picture

Global Warming: The Big Picture

Regular readers know that we have been debunking global warming (aka “climate change”) hysteria for a long time. As data accumulate the realist position that we have espoused becomes ever stronger. While it is often useful to take a deep dive into the data, it is also helpful to step back and see the big picture. That is what Ken Haapala, President of the Science and Environmental Policy Project, did in the most recent The Week That Was–an email to which you should subscribe, if you haven’t already. Turning the floor over to Haapala:  Last week’s TWTW discussed the two primary energy flows from the surface through the atmosphere into space as speculated in the influential 1979 Charney report: 1) carbon dioxide (CO2) absorbing and re-radiating (interfering with) some of the outbound long-wave radiation from the surface to space and 2) increased water vapor absorbing and re-radiating (interfering with) even more outbound long-wave radiation. According to the Charney Report, the increased water vapor is more significant than the CO2 in causing a warming of the planet.  Two key points here: 1) pretty much everyone agrees that the scientifically supportable consequence of doubling the CO2 in the atmosphere, a 1 degree increase in mean global temperature, would be a good thing. To get to the alarmists’ horror stories, you need to assume that increasing temperature by 1 degree would entail positive feedbacks that would quadruple that increase, or more. (This supposition seems obviously false, since in the past, when global temperatures were more than 1 degree warmer than they are today, no such feedbacks appeared.) The main positive feedback is a hypothetical increase in water vapor, which is far and away the main “greenhouse gas.” There is no basis in observation for this theory.  Further, TWTW discussed the 1997 model of the earth’s “Annual Global Mean Energy Budget” as presented by Kiehl and Trenberth paper published by the American Meteorological Society. In their graph, Figure 7, one can see the component allocated to outgoing longwave radiation and the component allocated to increasing water vapor, evapotranspiration and latent heat. Other publications disagree with the specific numbers but accept the concept. According to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and their followers, there is a water vapor component of release of latent heat in the upper troposphere. This is the so called “hot spot,” which is assumed to be located over the tropics and strongest at a pressure between 300 to 200 millibars (mb) (roughly 9 to 11 km, 30,000 to 36,000 feet above the tropics). Over 50% of the atmosphere is below 6 km. This “hot spot” has not been found and is not increasing as it should if the water vapor component of “CO2- caused global warming” is as strong as claimed in the Charney Report and repeated by the IPCC and others for 40 years. The recent McKitrick and Christy paper demonstrated that 60 years of weather balloon data have shown no such warming is taking place. Many other publications have likewise not found it.  If the “hot spot” doesn’t exist, the models on which global warming hysteria is based are wrong. Period.  Sunlight creates thermal chaotic motion of the atmosphere, which causes air with water vapor entrained to rise up. This convection process drives the winds and turbulence of the atmosphere. At the much cooler temperatures of altitudes like 10 km, water vapor condenses and becomes liquid, then ice. The conversion (phase change) from a gas back to a liquid (or solid) releases the latent heat into the atmosphere, slightly warming the nitrogen and oxygen. From high altitude, some heat is radiated into space, and part remains in the atmosphere. The entire process can be called a heat engine, or weather engine. When the Charney Report was written, the process was understood. This issue in question was: will a CO2-caused warming increase the intensity of this process, the weather engine?  That would seem to be an empirical question. But for the global warming hysterics, theory predominates over observation. That is the opposite of the scientific method.  Forty years of comprehensive atmospheric temperature trends, the last twenty years with no statistically significant warming, and 60 years of balloon observations show that the global atmosphere is not warming in a way indicating that the process is intensifying. The weather engine is not becoming more extreme. Thus, projections / forecasts / predictions from climate models or other means that CO2 warming is causing more extreme weather events are not supported by the hard evidence of temperature trends in the atmosphere. If there is any greenhouse gas effect that is significant at this time, it is the warming of the Arctic, not the Antarctic that is both warming and cooling. The Daily Mean Temperature graphs of the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI), from 1958 to current, north of the 80th northern parallel, show that temperatures are rising in the cold months, not the summer. In the cold months, the Arctic is extremely dry, thus the warming may be from an increase in water vapor from El Niños, the causes of which are not understood. Please note that the above discussion does not include transport of heat from the tropics to the polar regions both by the oceans and the atmosphere. As Richard Lindzen has discussed, any greenhouse gas warming of the polar regions is likely to be beneficial, because it lessens the temperature extremes (temperature gradient) between the tropics and the polar regions, thus reducing the driving forces of winds and severe storms. As climate change pioneer H.H. Lamb discussed in his book, “Climate, History and the Modern World,” the fiercest storms to hit Western Europe occurred during the Little Ice Age, a cold period.  To repeat: the alarmists’ models predict warming over the poles. That would reduce severe weather events, which are largely driven by the temperature difference between the poles and the equator. The corrupt alarmist kleptocracy ignored this rather obvious fact and propagandized a non-existent increase in severe weather events to keep the cash flowing. However low your opinion of global warming hysterics may be, it isn’t low enough.