Monthly Archives: April 2015

Bosse And Vahrenholt: Solar Cycle 24 Observations


German scientist Frank Bosse and Fritz Vahrenholt, on 12 March,  bluesunUnknownprovided another way to look at Solar Cycle 24. It is worth sharing. They posted “The Sun In March 2015” on the Notrickszone.com website. They begin by saying:

“Last month our sun gave a really sluggish impression. The sunspot number (SSN) was only 38.4: only 46% of what is normal at this time into a cycle for all the cycles observed since 1750.

The following chart illustrates their assertion:

solarcycle24sspotsgermanmaerz1Fig. 1: The current solar cycle 24 compared to the mean of all previous cycles (blue) and to solar cycle no. 1, 1755-1766, (black).

solarcycle24ssanomalygerman Figure 2 Comparing the individual cycles to each other further confirms that the current cycle is a quiet one compared to those we saw in the second half of the last century.

(March was the 76th month since the start of Cycle 24. These numbers will change as the Cycle 24 progresses, but the low activity will likely to continue to result in under performing almost all of the previous Cycles. )

The posting discusses the Sun’s polar fields.  Click on the link above to see the entire posting.

{Vahrenholt is co-publiser of the highly regarded book “Die kalte Sonne: warum die Klimakatastrophe nicht stattfindet[6] (The Cold Sun: Why the Climate Crisis Isn’t Happening).}

cbdakota

 

Taking One-third Of U.S. Coal-fired Power Plants Off The Grid By 2020 Simply Isn’t Workable


Obamaringingthebell109478_600Warner Baxter is chairman, president and CEO of St. Louis-based Ameren Corp, the largest energy provider in Missouri, serving more than 1.2 million electric and gas customers.  He says that” taking one-third of U.S. coal-fired power plants off the grid by 2020 simply isn’t workable”. He laid out the reasons for this belief  using a posting on the Wall Street Journal.com titled “The Dirty Secret of Obama’s Carbon Plan”. This posting is behind a paywall, so you may not be able to access it.

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Chinese Bank Challenges The World Bank-Providing Funds To Build Electrical Power Plants


China has established a bank that competes with the World Bank.   One of the things that this Chinese bank will offer will be loans to third world countries that want to improve the lives of their people by providing 9686-Light-Bulb-Mascot-Cartoon-Character-With-Welcoming-Open-Arms-Poster-Art-Printthem with electricity. The World Bank has banned any loans to these same countries if the country’s means of producing electricity is through the use of coal.   The World Bank’s policies are dictated by the US, Japan and the European nations. They have decided that these countries will produce just too much CO2. This is a wrongheaded policy predicated upon the questionable theory of catastrophic man-made global warming.

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Electric Vehicles And Hybrid Sales At Lowest Level Since 2011


These are troubling times for the electric vehicle (EV) and the hybrid (EHV) sales. The first 3 months of 2015 experienced lower sales than in the year 2011 which was the first full year of sales for the Chevy Volt (EVH) and the Nissan Leaf (EV).   Even though the buyer of a new EV or new EVH is still geting a $7500 tax credit, manufacturers are having to cut China Electric Car Bluesprices because the dealer’s inventories are building up. The low price of gasoline and the questions about electric vehicles durability are major reasons for this situation.  But there is another reason that is playing a big part in this problem.   A posting on Detroitnews.com titled “Electric vehicles lose buzz” talks about the issue of leasing:

“Edmunds.com reports that leases comprised nearly seven of every 10 plug-in cars that drove off dealer lots from January through March.

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DiCaprio, The Green Hypocrite


Well, no American MainStream Media source will ever call any Hollywood Green a hypocrite. So, if you happen to be curious about Leonardo DiCaprio’s green credentials you have to go off-shore, to say England, where the DailyMail.com provides a picture of how Mr. DiCaprio conducts his off-screen life. The UK blog posted this “Leonardo DiCaprio the ‘eco warrior’ flew on a private jet from NY to LA SIX times in SIX weeks, Sony hack documents reveal”. The storyline is:

“He’s a high profile advocate of environmental causes, believes the world must act now to combat the effects of global climate change and is producing documentaries about endangered species.

But accusations of hypocrisy have also dogged Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio, 40, with detractors accusing him of not practicing what he preaches.

RadarOnline said that several documents relating to Sony corporate travel records show the Titanic and Wolf Of Wall Street star took six private roundtrip private jet flights during April and May 2014.

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Now For Something Entirely Different


VOX.com has a page with “40 maps that explain the universe”. Photos and drawing plus text are there for your review. Some of the illustrations are really eye catching. For example:

Even a single comet is pretty darn big

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This is the comet 67P/C-G — which the Philae probe landed on in November 2014 — superimposed on Los Angeles. In terms of space, the comet is absolutely tiny: just 3.5 miles wide.

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5 IPCC Assessments Don’t Show Correlation Of Temperature And Severe Weather


Another Ronald Bailey of Reason.com posting is our feature today.   On 8 April, Bailey posted “Detection of Enhanced Greenhouse Warming:What The IPCC Said Back In 1990”.

si[imagesBailey’s previous posting listed reasons why he had switched from a skeptic to a warmer. He said there was a lot of pushback to that posting. People were challenging his assertions about climate models predictions of hurricanes, droughts, etc. He decided to review the 5 Assessment Reports (AR) produced by the Intergovernmental Pannel on Climate Change (IPCC), beginning with the first one issued in 1990. The results of the review in his words:

“As far as I can tell, all of the reports admit that the observational data do not definitively show any trends with regard to those particular aspects of climate. With regard to model outputs concerning those trends, the IPCC reports characterize them using tentative terminology such as “encouraging” back in 1990 and “medium evidence” and “medium agreement” in matching observational trends in the most recent report. In general, the models are not predicting a worsening trend in hurricanes, tornadoes, and droughts, at least in the short run.”

So the warmer’s bible cannot make the connection between “global warming” and severe weather.   But as that does not fit the narrative of the alarmist among the AGW crowd, they are ignoring this inconvenient fact.

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Skeptic And Warmer Viewpoints On Global Warming


arguinginternetimagesRonald Bailey is the science correspondent for Reason.com. On 3 April he posted: “What Would Convince You That Man-Made Global Warming Is Real.” He was, at one time, a skeptic but several years ago, changed is mind and became a believer in the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory. His posting has examples of why he changed his mind and wonders if these examples might convince other skeptics to become a warmer.

The posting resulted in a number of responses, some of which I will cover in this posting. The responses essentially are refutations of Bailey’s reasons for his conversion

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Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #175


Watts Up With That?

The Week That Was: 2015-04-04 (April 4, 2015) Brought to You by SEPP (www.SEPP.org) The Science and Environmental Policy Project

THIS WEEK: By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)

On to Paris: To keep pledges made at meetings (multiple Conference of Parties (COP)) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), an international treaty agreed to in 1992 by the first president Bush and which went into force in 1994, 33 out of 195 countries submitted their pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (particularly carbon dioxide (CO2)). These are to be agreed upon at the December COP in Paris. These pledges are called Intended National Determined Contribution (INDC). The countries that submitted pledges by March 31 included those in the European Union, the US, Russia, and Mexico.

The Obama administration submitted a US intended national determined contribution, without Congressional approval. It pledged to reduce…

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No Global Warming For 18 Years, 4 Months


When the “climategate” emails were revealed in 1998, a leading warmer scientist, Dr. Kevin Trenberth, said: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” He said in a 2014 UCAR publication, that he did not mean that quote the way everyone has taken it. Well, maybe. But he and 60 other warmer scientist have published theories trying to explain why there has been no statistically significant rise in the Global temperatures in 18 + years.

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