Atmospheric

Tropical Storm Sandy had the good fortune to hit New York City and the home of American media publishing during a presidential election. It thus became a Super Storm and a political rallying cry.  Weather and climate change were the same, declared BusinessWeek, a scant few years after the head of the NOAA and the IPCC repeatedly said we should not attribute weather events to climate change. It wasn't caused by climate change, but it was a 1-in-700 year storm in other ways and it became the only tropical cyclone in the historical record to do one thing. The storm…

India and China were both exempt from restrictions in the Kyoto agreements, because they were considered emerging economies. For that reason, while western nations have reduced their carbon footprints, CO2 emissions worldwide have continued upward. It's hard to tell people in developing nations that they have to stop progress and can't have air conditioners and will not enjoy things developed nations already have. Their increasing wealth is going to lead to the release vast amounts of the chemical hydroflourocarbon-23 (HFC-23) into the atmosphere, causing global greenhouse gas emissions to…

During the last American presidential election, the Obama team highlighted that support for their victory was across the board - 8 of the 10 wealthiest counties in America had gone their way, which was meant to show that rich people believed in his vision also. That means 8 of 10 counties feel something must be done about climate change, but if an analysis of Swiss homes is similar to America, they mean someone else must do the changing.  Writing in Environmental Science&Technology, Dominik Saner and colleagues found that energy conservation in a small number of households could go a…

Professor  Robert G Brown of Duke University makes a number of significant points at WUWT that I feel needed to be reposted here, with his permission. Let me set the stage. By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley As Anthony and others have pointed out,even the New York Times has at last been constrained to admit what Dr. Pachauri of the IPCC was constrained to admit some months ago. There has been no global warming statistically distinguishable from zero for getting on for two decades. The NYT says the absence of warming arises because skeptics cherry-pick 1998, the year of the Great el…

Since posting this I have discovered that the difference signal I was looking at was not daily minimum temp, but daily maximum temp. A new analysis of minimum temps will be found here. Climate science is all about surface temperature trends. The problem with this is that the CAGW is a rate of cooling problem, not a static temperature problem. Figure 1 Night time temperature profile of a clear sky night in NE Ohio. 8:28pm Sunset/6:16am Sunrise Is Co2 changing the rate of cooling, thereby altering the expected surface temperature, are the hypothesized positive feedbacks actually there, are…

The Van Allen radiation belts in in the Earth's upper atmosphere, two doughnut-shaped rings of highly charged particles, were discovered in 1958. The Van Allen radiation belts consist of an inner ring of high-energy electrons and energetic positive ions, and an outer ring of high-energy electrons.   But then in February of this year, a team of scientists writing in Science reported a previously unknown third radiation ring, which circled the Earth between the inner and outer rings in September 2012 and then almost completely disappeared.   How did this temporary radiation belt…

By outsourcing manufacturing to China - sending jobs Americans don't want, according to immigration experts - America is also outsourcing carbon dioxide emissions. China is now doing the same thing, but to themselves. Coastal provinces are outsourcing emissions to poorer provinces in the interior, according to U.C. Irvine scholar Steve Davis and colleagues in a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper. Beijing and Shanghai import steel, heavy industrial equipment and other materials from provinces like Inner Mongolia, where highly polluting manufacturing facilities produce the…

Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), known to deplete ozone, are also to blame for global warming since the 1970s, according to a paper in the International Journal of Modern Physics B. The statistical analysis found that CFCs are the key driver in global climate change, rather than carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, which the author says would explain why temperature has not continued to rise as CO2 has - CFCs have gone down a lot. The findings are based on statistical analyses of observed data from 1850 up to the present time, the cosmic-ray-driven electron-reaction (CRE) hypothesis of ozone depletion…

Researchers say their more reliable projections of global warming estimates at 2100 have narrowed the predicted range of global warming. Exceeding 6 degrees warming, one of the more extreme estimates, is now unlikely while 2 degrees is very likely for business-as-usual emissions, say Dr. Roger Bodman from Victoria University and Professors David Karoly and Peter Rayner from the University of Melbourne. Western nations have already dropped their CO2 emissions, the United States in particular has slashed its carbon dioxide emissions in energy production by switching from coal to more…

I recently read an article about an individual that had been struck by lightning, while it was interesting to read about the experience it was disturbing to read some of the comments that followed and their gross misunderstanding of lightning. In particular the following comment illustrates the problem. Lightning happens when a really huge negative charge builds up in the ground, corresponding to a positive charge overhead, and the differential becomes sufficient to jump the gap. (and, as others are pointing out repeatedly, air is an excellent insulator, so it takes a whacking huge voltage…