Archive for May, 2014

Polar sea ice broken up by freewheeling ocean waves from distant storms

Posted: May 31, 2014 by tchannon in sea ice, waves, weather, wind

Pierre L. Gosselin reports on a Spiegel Online article

Models Wrong Again…Sea Ice Break-Up Caused In Large Part By Storm-Generated Oceanic Wave And Wind Dynamics!

By P Gosselin on 31. Mai 2014

Spiegel science journalist Axel Bojanowski has a fascinating piece on what likely causes most of the sea ice to break up. The Spiegel introduction:

Sea ice is disappearing in the Arctic, around the Antarctic it is growing – today’s conventional climate models are unable to explain this contradiction. One effect has just been measured by sensors: wave motion is able to crack ice, hundreds of kilometers away.”

Link to NoTricksZone article Follow his link to the Spiegel photos, magnificent.

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36 year old ISEE-3 Spacecraft successfully awoken by amateur team

Posted: May 30, 2014 by tchannon in People power

Image

This is a plot of signal received from the satellite and an overlay of the theoretic signal. Carrier (the spike) and modulation sidebands. The frequency will move with time because of doppler, spacecraft and earth are moving relative to each other.

This is a comment made at WUWT by a team member

denniswingo says:
May 29, 2014 at 3:17 pm

Just came down from off the dome at the telescope. Thanks for all your support! I will put together a more comprehensive article over the weekend.

Just FYI, both transmitters on the spacecraft have been commanded into engineering telemetry mode and we are receiving data.

Snippets, they are trying to act before lunar impact is likely; the spacecraft is not where it was supposed to be but there are no details on by how much or why.

Project website article

We Are Now In Command of the ISEE-3 Spacecraft

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US Sci Tech Committee hearing on IPCC

Posted: May 29, 2014 by tallbloke in solar system dynamics

Paul Matthews's avatarThe IPCC Report

The US Committee on Science, Space and Technology held a 2-hour hearing Examining the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Process today.

The aim was to evaluate the processes behind IPCC AR5.

The witnesses were Richard Tol, Michael Oppenheimer, Daniel Botkin, Roger Pielke Sr. The link above includes the opening statements of the witnesses.

Donna Laframboise has a blog post where she says “Experts condemn the IPCC”.

The views of Tol and Pielke are probably fairly familiar to most. Botkin’s comments were particularly interesting. He said that species are resilient and adaptable and that scares of extinctions have been greatly exaggerated. He also said that focus on global warming had distracted attention from other more serious environmental problems. It was left to Oppenheimer to defend the IPCC orthodoxy.

There was a live feed of the session, but it was rather patchy. There are some videos:

Video 1 (wind forward to 15:40 where it…

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“climate models violate the ‘basic physics’ of the 2nd law of thermodynamics”

Posted: May 29, 2014 by tchannon in atmosphere, climate, Incompetence, Measurement, methodology

Reblog from The Hockey Schtick, new paper in Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. Pesky radiosonde data again. Maybe the balloon has gone up on models Climate Sim World.

New paper finds climate models violate the ‘basic physics’ of the 2nd law of thermodynamics
A paper published today in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society finds climate models violate the ‘basic physics’ of the Second Law of Thermodynamics with respect to simulating conventional turbulent heat flow, one of the most important mechanisms of heat transfer in the atmosphere.

According to the authors,
“Numerical models of the atmosphere should fulfil fundamental physical laws. The Second Law of thermodynamics is associated with positive local entropy production and dissipation of available energy.”
i.e. entropy always increases and energy always dissipates per the second law of thermodynamics. …

Link to THE HOCKEY SCHTICK and paywalled paper.

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European Alpine ski resort, been cooling for some years

Posted: May 27, 2014 by tchannon in climate, Natural Variation, weather

Reblog from P. Gosselin’s NoTricksZone

Image

This report traces back to a ski report article which shows data.

Don’t think this is supposed to happen but local global warming allows for local global cooling, any oxymoron going.

I wonder whether this is more general?

Link to article.

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Dude, where’s my global warming?

Posted: May 27, 2014 by oldbrew in alarmism, humour, propaganda
Go Brits [credit: William M Briggs]

Go Brits [credit: William M Briggs]

Not hard to tell where this one is coming from…

‘The Consensus, i.e. 97% civilian agreement, is that climatologists are full of hot air.’

Matt Briggs reports: IPCC Intensifies Search For Missing Global Warming

EU twisting facts to fit political agenda, its chief scientist says

Posted: May 27, 2014 by tallbloke in Accountability, Analysis, government, Idiots, Incompetence, methodology, Politics, propaganda

From EUrActiv:

facts

A big challenge for the next European Commission will be to disconnect its evidence gathering processes from the “political imperative” that’s driving policy proposals, according to Anne Glover, the EU’s chief scientific advisor.

Speaking before the EU elections last week, Glover reflected upon her role, which was introduced by the outgoing President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso.

Glover was appointed in December 2011 to provide the President of the EU Executive with first-class independent scientific advice. A trained biologist who holds a chair in Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of Aberdeen, she previously served a as chief scientific advisor for Scotland (2006-2011).

More than two years into her job, she seems to have learned a great deal about the internal working of the EU’s flagship institution.

And her assessment of what goes on inside the Commission’s walls is not rosy.
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Reflections on Elections: UKIP wins the Euros and a raft of local council seats

Posted: May 26, 2014 by tallbloke in government, History, Politics, propaganda

josh-cheers_nigel_scrIt’s been a gruelling campaign season. As well as standing for council in my own Leeds ward of Guiseley and Rawdon, I’ve been working hard to support the campaigns of our Yorkshire MEP candidates since my own election as vice chair of my local UKIP branch. By and large it has paid off. Last night we took three MEP seats at the Yorkshire and Humberside Euro election count in Leeds town hall. In the local election I garnered 20% of the vote from a standing start, finishing five points behind Labour and 15 points behind the winning Tory candidate in a ward which didn’t have a UKIP candidate at either of the last two elections.

The feedback I got on the doorstep was very encouraging. There is good awareness of the issues, and a lot of people ‘get it’ with what UKIP is saying concerning the lack of accountability and control. The LibLabCon media slurs did have some impact though, and as one of my activists and I were putting up roadside signboards last week a father who was jogging past with his young son remarked; “Oh look, the racist party is out tonight’. It’s not nice to be on the receiving end of such comments. Unfair especially as UKIP enjoys more support from the ethnic minorities than the Conservative and LibDem parties put together.
farnley-wortley
Our branch fielded a full rack of 17 candidates in 17 wards on our side of the city, coming second in nine of them. In Farnley & Wortley, we came within 300 votes of winning against the Greens. Elsewhere we took a lot of votes from the main parties too. This is a great achievement and a good bounce on the springboard in the run-up to the General Election in 2015. We hope to get our first UKIP councillors into the chamber at Leeds next year.

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Climate propaganda finger pointed at marathon runners

Posted: May 26, 2014 by oldbrew in climate, Idiots, media, propaganda

London marathon {credit: Wikipedia]

London marathon [credit: Wikipedia]


Nothing is too silly to print when it comes to climate propaganda, it seems.

The idea they want to put in people’s heads is that even breathing is a ‘danger to the planet’, so faster breathing…you get the idea.

Does the marathon hasten climate change?

We can’t say ‘you couldn’t make it up’ because someone just did.

1947 Shock News : 10 Degrees Arctic Warming To Melt The Polar Ice Caps And Drown The Planet

Posted: May 25, 2014 by tallbloke in solar system dynamics

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And then cooling from 1948-1976. Climate cycles anyone?

Tony Heller's avatarReal Climate Science

A real wake up call from 70 years ago! The Arctic was warming catastrophically, and was going to melt and drown us all.

ScreenHunter_112 May. 24 18.21

31 May 1947 – ARCTIC CLIMATE’S ALARMING CHANGE

Perhaps after scientists recycle this story for the 100th time, someone will pay attention.

View original post

The Age of Unenlightenment.

Posted: May 25, 2014 by tallbloke in solar system dynamics

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Pointman analyses the wider import of the Lennart Bengtsson debacle.

Pointman's avatarPointman's

That slick expression you’re entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts, now has a deeper meaning in this latest stage of the post-enlightenment. If your facts plainly contradict someone else’s orthodox beliefs, then you are simply being “unhelpful” or even “harmful” and should therefore be suppressed. That’s to be done not by logical refutation or counter argument, but intimidation, bullying, shunning, character assassination and threats to a person’s career or livelihood.

Basically, the gloves come off and you get mobbed by a gang of like-minded thugs. Destroy the person, not the argument.

It’s the sort of behaviour one could expect of a medieval theocracy whose dominance is under threat by the advance of reasoned argument. Indeed, the humanists of Europe fought that battle from the late seventeenth century onwards, resulting in what’s commonly known as the Age of Enlightenment. There’s a lot more to it but from then on…

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Milankovitch orbital parameters and Arctic ice

Posted: May 25, 2014 by tchannon in Celestial Mechanics, Ice ages, paleo, radiative theory, solar system dynamics

skyfall.fr are one of our sceptical European friends

Image

Figure from paper cited later. If the top trace is correct that is a superb match between insolation (P) and proxy. A lot of reading follows.

Under the title “Lindzen lors de l’audit de l’APS : Milankovitch et l’Arctique”
http://www.skyfall.fr/?p=1280

For anglophones
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.skyfall.fr%2F%3Fp%3D1280&edit-text=

I’ll let skyfall speak and then then link the interesting part.

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Bungling BBC Get It Wrong Again

Posted: May 23, 2014 by oldbrew in Energy

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Britain running out of oil?

Funny – could have sworn the BBC was reporting today that oceans of oil are waiting to be tapped under southern England. The BBC eh – LOL.

The consultation comes as a new report by the British Geological Survey (BGS) estimates there are 4.4bn barrels of oil in shale rocks in southern England.

Perhaps they get a small benefit of the doubt as the oil report wasn’t available at the time of the article below, but surely the author knew something was in the, er… pipeline? (sorry)

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Settled science shock: universe not expanding, says study

Posted: May 23, 2014 by oldbrew in Astrophysics, Uncertainty
Big Bang [image credit: wikipedia]

Big Bang [image credit: wikipedia]

More ‘settled science’ on the ropes.

Quote: ‘These results are consistent with what would be expected from ordinary geometry if the Universe was not expanding, and are in contradiction with the drastic dimming of surface brightness predicted by the expanding Universe hypothesis.’

But Wikipedia says : ‘The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological model for the early development of the universe. The key idea is that the universe is expanding.‘

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Major player abandons research on CO2 storage

Posted: May 23, 2014 by oldbrew in Energy, innovation
image credit: Vattenfall Europe

image credit: Vattenfall Europe

Vattenfall pulled out in early May: ‘The group said that CCS was not among its priorities anymore.’

That puts a big dent in the UK’s carbon storage ambitions announced a few days ago, as discussed here at the Talkshop:
Another financial opportunity for CO2 scare merchants

Press report:
Vattenfall throws the towel in on CCS

The peril of the press release

Posted: May 22, 2014 by tallbloke in solar system dynamics

Ali TT's avatarattheinterface

In a famous piece of media analysis, the average length of a soundbite in a US presidential election was found to have collapsed from 43 seconds in 1968 to just nine by 1988. Although the discovery led to plenty of head-scratching and fears about the “dumbing down” of political discourse, in the end it changed very little.

After the first day of the Circling the Square conference, it would be easy to conclude that the communication of science by the media is heading in the same direction.

Anyone who has read Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News will be aware that mainstream journalism is in a crisis. Newsroom cuts have seen journalists forced to produce more copy in shorter time with less resources.  “Churnalism”, the phenomenon of reporting press releases or wire copy ad verbatim as news stories, has grown over recent years.

Science journalism is not immune to these woes, as illustrated…

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Frontears of mediocrity: Lewandowsky & Mann on the march

Posted: May 21, 2014 by tallbloke in solar system dynamics

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Hilary Ostrov hits the nail on the head.

Hilary Ostrov (aka hro001)'s avatarThe View From Here

A little over four months ago, Dr. Judith Curry had excerpted and commented on what I would call a meeting of the mindless, i.e. a joint whine paired with cheesey (and unsubstantiated) allegations, co-authored by two self-declared “experts” – psychologist, Stephan Lewandowsky and climate scientist, Michael Mann – who share an extreme aversion to disclosing the data and code behind their contributions to the annals of so-called “peer-reviewed” literature in their respective fields.

Leader of Camp CookLewNut (aka John Cook, Stephan Lewandowsky and Dana Nuccitelli), Lewandowsky is known for his magnificent obsession and his mediocre “scholarship” riddled with self-serving lies, while Mann’s stream of misrepresentations and abuse in lieu of reasoned discussion of his unsubstantiated claims via Twitter and Facebook is nothing short of legendary – almost as legendary as his most notorious “creation” [h/t Joelle Gergis], his iconic “hockey-stick”.

Here this newly formed dynamic duo of Lewandowsky and…

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Pfizer makes new ‘final’ offer to buy Wales

Posted: May 21, 2014 by oldbrew in humour

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A bit of light relief for Talkshop readers. No offence intended of course.

Tom Pride's avatarPride's Purge

(satire?)

US drugs giant Pfizer has made an improved offer for Wales as it tries to tie up the largest foreign takeover of a UK country.

The new offer of £55 per share would value Wales at about £6bn.

The offer constitutes a 15% increase from Pfizer’s proposal on 2 May and is final and cannot be increased, it said.

The US company is now offering government ministers in London £24.76 in cash and 1.747 shares in the country – worth a combined £55 – for each share currently they don’t hold.

“What we’ve learned tonight is that there were talks over the weekend and actually Pfizer made a tentative approach of £53.50 but was told by the Welsh Assembly this in their view substantially undervalued the country,” said BBC chief economics correspondent Hugh Pym. “I think there’s a game of poker going on here.”

Pfizer plans to create the world’s…

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Another financial opportunity for CO2 scare merchants

Posted: May 21, 2014 by oldbrew in alarmism, Energy, government, Politics

CCS process [image credit: European Commission]

CCS process [image credit: European Commission]


It’s well known that there’s big money to be made peddling unproven claims that the world’s climate is under threat from man’s activities, and the BBC seems keen to publicise such things.

The latest idea to join the queue at the ‘climate change trough’ is to charge countries for burying their ‘surplus’ CO2 under the North Sea. It’s a variation of the carbon capture and storage plans that seem to be going nowhere fast.

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Solar periodic instability

Posted: May 19, 2014 by tchannon in Analysis, Solar physics

The Talkshop likes to occassionally discuss the mystery of solar periodic timing, is it regular, chaotic, or some as yet undiscovered formula?

Image

Figure 1

A simple decomposition of the annual sunspot number, three terms, was done for the period 1855 to 2005 inclusive, a period that seems reasonably consistent in characteristic. r2 = 0.81 for that timespan. See Figure 1.

This is a non-discrete Fourier decomposition therefore it can be re based to any time and a new time series created, figure 1 shows this done from 1700.5, the start of the SIDC annual data. In effect a hind-cast but also a slight forecast since it seems the sun is once again erratic.

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