Andy May is a retired petrophysicist and has published six books. He worked on oil, gas and CO2 fields in the USA, Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia, Thailand, China, UK North Sea, Canada, Mexico, Venezuela and Russia. He specialized in shale petrophysics, fractured reservoirs, wireline and core image interpretation, and capillary pressure analysis, besides conventional log analysis. His full resume is here: AndyMay
Dear Andy May,
let me introduce myself as the translator of your articles into German. I consider your contributions as of utmost importance. I am a meteorologist, subject weather analysis and -forecasting – and a climate realist from the beginning.
Just in case…
Best regards Chris Frey
Hi Chris, Good to hear from you. I appreciate your efforts.
I have a climate science and energy blog where I present the best articles I read online each day. So far this month, a surprising number of them from WUWT had the byline “Andy May”. I have never seen one author turn out so many consistently good articles in one month, and the month is not yet over. That’s based on 25 years of cleat science reading.
The WUWT articles did not seem to mention that you had a website, but I looked for one anyway, and discovered you did. So I searched for, and discovered, you had your own website today. And learned that you are a retired, which I suspected, with so many articles. And a Ph.D., which surprised me, because you don’t have the usual tedious “Ph.D. writing style”.
I’m writing to say “keep up the good work”, at this incredible pace so far in March 2022, if it can continue. I hope you have no problem with me presenting edited versions of some of your articles on my blog — but not the day you publish them.
That’s what you get for writing so many good articles. From now on, I’ll provide a link to your your website, instead of a link to WUWT. I’m also going to recommend your website as a bookmark for my readers. Something I’ve only done once before. I’ve had close to 300,000 visits in the past few years and hope lots of my readers start viewing your website regularly.
My short edited version of your latest article is here:
https://elonionbloggle.blogspot.com/2022/03/uah-vs-rss-satellite-global-average.html
Richard Greene
Bingham Farms, Michigan
Thanks for the very kind words, Richard and feel free to repost any of my work that you like, with attribution. I appreciate it when people mention my personal site as well. I’m not sure where on my site that you got the impression that I have a PhD, I do not. My only college degree is a BS in Geology from the University of Kansas.
A BS degree is good enough for me.
I have a BS degree too.
(detecting BS, not spouting BS)
And a Finance MBA.
Retired at age 51 in January 2005.
Discovered that I was allergic to work.
I read many articles on your website before
recommending it, and one mentioned a Ph.D.
I just realized that article was by Javier, not you.
I don’t care about degrees.
I look for common sense, logic, consistency
and no wild guess predictions of the future climate.
If the author insults a leftist Climate Alarmist
once in a while — that gets bonus points !
That Javier article was
the only one I didn’t care for
— deliberately trying
to get Covid infected?
Who does that?
The article was good
until that point.
That RSS arbitrary revision
in either 2015 or 2016
steered me to UAH.
The WUWT articles ought to start
with a link to your website.
Richard Greene
Bingham Farms, Michigan
Compliments on your “Climate, CO2, and the Sun” post. Recommend comparing David D.R. Stockwell vs IPCC. Stockwell shows that temperature follows the INTEGRAL of Solar insolation with a Pi/2 (90 deg) lag. Best. e.g.
Stockwell, D.R., 2011. On the Dynamics of Global Temperature. August 2011a. URL, 186, p.55
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.397.4553&rep=rep1&type=pdf.
Stockwell, D.R., Key evidence for the accumulative model of high solar influence on Global Temperature.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David_Stockwell3/publication/228517399_Key_Evidence_for_the_Accumulative_Model_of_High_Solar_Influence_on_Global_Temperature/links/0a85e532e35de53d8a000000.pdf
https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=ItN6tJ4AAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate
Thanks, excellent articles.
Andy, I hesitate to ask this but would you have the time or consider reading and steel-manning short papers from strangers such as myself. I have put together a 1st person narrative of the issue of CAGW, energy and, a long side-bar, into the way our bi-hemispheric brains render the world into being. I know that sounds kind of pretentious but most of what I have in the domain of climate science derives from Javier and I was hoping to have someone with the background, such as yourself, would be interested in looking it over and offering a critique.
The rest of it deals, as alluded, to energy and the Hemisphere Hypothesis of Iain McGilchrist. And the reason I’m doing this is because I perceive the network of virtually everyone I know to be either convinced, confused or indifferent to the notion of climate catastrophe. And almost everyone I know represent what I see as a large sample of the general public whose understanding or curiosity to the nature of what both you and I understand to be the path to energy poverty as something that will just sort itself out.
My intuition tells me otherwise and I want to reach out and engage them and hope that they will be energized sufficiently to do likewise.
My plan is to take my paper and try to distribute into that network of individuals and try to engage them in a measure of understanding that transcends what passes for information. But I want what I distribute to be properly steel-manned because I think it should be based on facts as we know them.
So if you don’t feel that you can entertain this, well no harm no foul. But if I have piqued your curiosity I would appreciate it enormously. I’m including my email if you would like me to send you a copy.
I am:
Mark Heidel
mark.heidel@protonmail.com
Thanks!!
I’ve been following your blog for a while, and I always appreciate the depth of research you put into your posts. Your writing style is engaging, and I love how you explained it. It makes it easy for readers like me to understand complex concepts. Thank you for sharing this valuable information. It’s incredibly helpful for someone like me who’s interested. If you are interested to know about the UPSC Coaching In Indore
Here is an interesting article
https://science.feedback.org/review/robust-scientific-evidence-supports-human-activity-drives-global-warming-contrary-to-claims-co2-coalition-blog-post-andy-may/
Divad,
Sorry science feedback/climate feedback are not reliable sources, and this post is just another example of their obvious misinformation. They have been ridiculed in the Wall Street Journal and fired by Facebook. Ignore them. For details, search “andymaypetrophysicist: science feedback” and you will find numerous examples. As for the “atmospheric fingerprint” myth do the same search but put in “atmospheric fingerprint.”
As for the modern version of the silly “atmospheric fingerprint” in AR6, the so-called pattern matching, it is statistically invalid as shown by McKitrick (2021, 2022, 2023).
Chen, et al. (2024, rejected in 2021) tries to show that McKitrick’s criticisms of the atmospheric fingerprint are incorrect. In fact, Chen, et al. mostly confirm McKitrick’s conclusions, but try and say they don’t matter and can be assumed away. For Ross McKitrick’s detailed criticisms of Chen, et al. see:
https://www.rossmckitrick.com/uploads/4/8/0/8/4808045/comments.chenetal.pdf
The Climate Science post is just SOS and just as invalid today as it was 10 years ago when I first saw these old arguments. Science feedback has repeatedly made fools of themselves and no one intelligent pays any attention to them anymore.
Another example of science feedback failure, they can’t seem to get anything right. Facebook was quite right to fire them:
“Said recommendations were frequently misguided. In December 2021, a fact-checker called Science Feedback flagged something I had written for Reason as “false information.” As a result, the article’s image was blurred and its distribution was presumably impacted. As Science Feedback later conceded, their fact-check was erroneous—my article was not. The decision was eventually reversed; TV host John Stossel had a similar experience.”
Link:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/mark-zuckerberg-fire-facebooks-rogue-222618047.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYmluZy5jb20v&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAHgu65-IfqX0alpeHxqeWO_j2khnKhsIaAtjRocNTnslFBA9p5tSuTgRNG9c-cpORoV4L1hEqEjpgq1ou9ErpQ3-S3XskhqU-NKg4vmgYqgnbP8I5NhPoSC3N3LGGTVSChdon0UEJ0Wnhl3WNMvkgaCt5XpYT1yF5qVYGXn6ey3N
Dear Sir,
First of all, I would like to thank you for your articles, which I have been reading on this blog and on WUWT for several months now. I also had the pleasure of finding, under the Christmas tree last year, the French translation of Frozen Views of the IPCC, which I read carefully and with great interest.
I regret that alarmism dominates the media landscape, and that scientists affiliated with the IPCC unfortunately allow themselves to spread apocalyptic messages whenever they are handed a microphone. Yet there is nothing particularly terrifying in what we are currently experiencing: no signal clearly emerging from the noise for most extreme events; admittedly, heatwaves are more frequent, which is logical insofar as we have been emerging from the Little Ice Age around 1850; human well-being is improving in many parts of the world; the Earth is greening; crop yields are increasing. Of course, not everything is perfect, but I shudder at the thought of the outcry our ancestors would raise if they saw so many young and old people complaining about their present lives and calling for degrowth, considering what standards of comfort and quality of life were like in the 19th century—a time when my forebears were more occupied with working the land, avoiding starvation, and dodging shells during the Napoleonic campaigns than with constantly complaining about every conceivable issue.
I am writing to thank you for your work and also to submit a question that has been on my mind for some time. Its substance is as follows.
I know that there were several thousand ppm of CO₂ in the atmosphere in very ancient times, and that this apparently did not trigger a runaway greenhouse effect. The Ordovician period is particularly interesting in that it culminated in a glaciation, which an extremely high level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere did not prevent. The configuration of the continents was very different at that time (Gondwana was located in the southern part of the globe, which, as I understand it, may have favored glaciation), but those thousands of ppm of CO₂ were logically present before the climate cooled; therefore, there must have been a period—one I imagine to have been “fairly long”—during which very high CO₂ levels did not cause thermal runaway. Of course, reconstructing such remote times is extremely delicate, and one cannot be entirely certain about anything, which makes paleoclimatology both frustrating, it must be said, and wonderfully fascinating.
The correlation between CO₂ and temperature over the very long term is, to say the least, uncertain. The “Holocene paradox” is interesting in this respect, especially since this period is much closer to us than the Cretaceous, and even more so than the Ordovician, given that we are currently in a Holocene interglacial.
Here is the core of my question: can we reasonably take into account very distant periods, such as the Ordovician and the Cretaceous, during which the atmosphere contained much more CO₂ than today, in order to temper the climate alarmism inherent in our greenhouse gas emissions since the beginning of the industrial period? Every era is different, whether for orbital, geological, or atmospheric reasons, and of course all these parameters interact with one another. But the “knockout argument” of climate alarmists is that we humans are continuously injecting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, thereby disrupting the carbon cycle, and that regardless of the state the Earth may have been in at some X or Y period, what matters is the present—and the fact that the climate system may react violently to this “anthropogenic interference.”
That line of reasoning seems difficult to refute, even though I doubt that the origin of a molecule can alter its effect in the atmosphere: CO₂ remains CO₂, and there is no reason why it should “initiate” catastrophic warming; at most, it will enhance the greenhouse effect. Moreover, the biosphere appears to be tolerating our addition of greenhouse gases rather well, as evidenced by the greening observed by NASA satellites since 1980 and the thickening of Amazonian forests rather than their drying out. My main question concerns the speed and constancy of our greenhouse gas injections. Can the saturation effect of CO₂, and its logarithmic character—about which I learned by listening to Professors Happer and Wijngaarden—be considered “physically immutable,” regardless of the speed at which we inject greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and the continuity of that addition? In short: does the fact that we are adding CO₂ to the atmosphere in an increasing and continuous manner alter the “rules of the game”?
I realize that this question may seem absurd to you, in which case I apologize, but I would be very grateful if you could help me see more clearly on this subject, if only to dispel any flaws in my (modest) understanding of the greenhouse effect and the Earth’s climate.
Please accept, dear Sir, my most sincere regards, and warm greetings from France!
Charles Armand
P.S.: Please excuse any spelling mistakes or linguistic inaccuracies in this message. My English skills do not allow me to compose satisfactory messages, so I have entrusted the translation of these words to ChatGPT.
WRT: “Here is the core of my question: can we reasonably take into account very distant periods, such as the Ordovician and the Cretaceous, during which the atmosphere contained much more CO₂ than today, in order to temper the climate alarmism inherent in our greenhouse gas emissions since the beginning of the industrial period?”
Charles,
The translation was fine and very clear. Yes, I think you can make that assumption. The effect of CO2 in the Ordovician is the same as today. Also, the Earth is not runaway and will never be as long as we have oceans. See here:
https://andymaypetrophysicist.com/2016/09/03/earth-and-venus/
On another subject. I once looked at the natural gas potential in France, and it is huge! Do you anticipate France lifting its “frac’ing” ban at some point. You could supply all your natural gas needs quite easily.
Dear Sir,
Thank you very much for your reply. I have carefully read the article whose link you sent me.
So, to summarize: the effect of CO₂ on Earth tens or hundreds of millions of years ago is the same as it is today; the geological configuration of the Earth is secondary with regard to its relationship to the greenhouse effect caused by carbon dioxide; the oceans regulate and buffer thermal fluctuations on Earth, so that a “Venus-like” runaway effect is extremely unlikely; Venus and Earth are two completely different systems, each “normal” in its own way, with its own atmospheric and geological characteristics.
What remains is the response always given by alarmists, even though you have explained the role of the oceans to them: “Anthropogenic activities are increasing atmospheric CO₂ at a rate never seen before,” to which it is difficult to respond either positively or negatively. I would simply point to the WG1 table in the AR6, which shows that the majority of extreme events are not increasing, and that humanity is far better off in 2026 than in 1926 or 1826.
Focusing relentlessly on the CO₂ parameter ultimately seems rather strange to me: the climate is an extremely complex system, and we have seen no catastrophe so far. I also find it hard to believe that the planet could be as fragile as many environmental activists claim. Moreover, the warming since 1850 has not been linear, whereas our activities have continuously emitted CO₂ into the atmosphere.
Regarding natural gas in France: it is unfortunately not even worth mentioning fracking to our elected officials. The nuclear fleet has already been partially undermined by governments beholden to radical environmentalists. Wind turbines and solar panels have been installed almost everywhere. The Multiannual Energy Program No. 3 (PPE3), if it is truly implemented (which I hope it will not be!), will result in the installation of offshore wind farms that will bring us nothing except higher energy prices and a disfigurement of seascapes. It deeply saddens me that such a beautiful country should be left in the hands of such incompetence.
When I speak about hydraulic fracturing to some people around me, they say: “Just look at the USA—when people living near a fracking site turn on their tap, polluted water comes out: you only have to hold a match near it and it catches fire.”
I do not know what to make of these “flammable tap water” stories, but those who invoke this argument are generally opposed to nuclear power and consider wind turbines wonderful. I do not understand them.
In any case, thank you again for your reply, dear Sir.
Charles Armand
We live about 4 km east of a major gas field (first developed in the 1970s) where all the wells are frac’d and just south and west (maybe 15 km) of the giant Conroe gas and oil field where all the wells are frac’s and it was discovered in the 1930s. No one around these fields (over half a million people) has ever had gas or oil or flames coming out of their taps. Hardly anyone has even seen the wells or the infrastructure for the fields even though thousands live right on top of the fields. What your friends are talking about is a myth. The fields are well below the water table, too far to make a difference.
All the incidents of natural gas getting into ground water than I know of are either due to biogenic gas (bacteria in the soil) or due to underground blow outs of old wells damaged by construction or digging of some kind (like for pipelines or building construction).
Several state agencies directly examined the specific water‑well cases featured in Gasland. Their conclusions consistently pointed to naturally occurring methane, not hydraulic fracturing:
The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission determined that the wells shown in the film contained biogenic methane unrelated to drilling activity.
Multiple reviews noted that the film incorrectly attributed contamination cases to fracking when investigations showed otherwise.
These findings undercut the film’s most iconic image — the flaming faucet — by showing that methane migration in those areas predated shale development and was common in shallow aquifers.
In short, natural gas occurs in groundwater commonly and has nothing to do with frac’ing, just biogenic gas or natural seeps or construction accidents.
Well, that doesn’t surprise me at all! The French media (as is often the case in Europe, I’m afraid) are sold to the environmentalist cause. Don’t count on our journalists to put things into context. And even if I repeated all of this, with evidence to back it up, to people around me, I think many would refuse to believe me. They saw a flaming faucet on television, and that’s it — case closed. You’ll never get them to change their minds. They would probably say to me: “Andy May? He worked for the oil industry — he must be corrupt!” (By the way, I very much appreciated your account of the “ExxonKnew” affair.)
Oil companies, before selling oil, sell energy. You can’t even accuse them of having ignored renewables: they tried their hand at them, and then, when they saw that it wasn’t working and that they were losing enormous sums of money, they pulled back. Who could blame them? If an energy company makes a profit from oil, gas, and coal, there’s a reason for that — and if its earnings drop drastically with renewables, that’s no coincidence.
Public bias is similar when it comes to glyphosate. Europe doesn’t seem to have too much of a problem with it, but France in particular appears to be on a crusade against it. People have been so thoroughly convinced that this molecule causes cancer that any number of studies in the world showing the opposite (and even demonstrating the essential role of crop protection products) will seem suspicious to them. “More studies paid for by the chemical industry!” Synthetic pesticides cause cancer — for them, that’s an established fact. Now they think copper sulfate (also called “Bordeaux mixture” in France) is a wonderful thing, and they will accuse you of dishonesty if you tell them that copper is also very dangerous and that it accumulates in the soil. But of course, it’s “natural,” so it must be harmless. A bit like arsenic, mercury, death cap mushrooms, and Ebola… Disheartening!
In short, I don’t want to take up too much of your time. I’m very glad that you took the time to respond to my questions, and I thank you very much for it. Your work, and that of your skeptical colleagues, is necessary and indispensable.