Climate, CO2, and the Sun

By Andy May

Christian Freuer has translated this post into German here.

In my previous post on multiple regression of known solar cycles versus HadCRUT5, I simply threw the solar cycles, ENSO, and sunspots into the regression blender and compared the result to various models that included CO2. Before reading this post, it is a good idea to read the previous one, since much of this post relies on the information in it. It was a very simple statistical analysis designed to show that the IPCC conclusion that rising CO2 and other greenhouse gases are “responsible” for “1.1°C of warming since 1850-1900” is probably erroneous. The difference between the HadCRUT5 1850-1900 average and the 2018-2023 (through all of 2022) is 1.18°C, so they are saying that essentially all the warming since the 19th century is due to humans. The analyses described in this post show they cannot be certain of their conclusion because they have ignored persuasive evidence that changes in the Sun caused at least some of the warming.

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Modeling HadCRUT5 with CO2 and without CO2

By Andy May

I hate statistics, as many of you know. Some people think statistics and/or statistical models that meet standard statistical criteria are facts. The IPCC can be like that. They statistically model global surface temperatures with models of volcanic and anthropogenic forcing and compare the model to one with only volcanic forcing. Then they turn to us, with a straight face, and say the comparison shows anthropogenic forcing is driving all the warming. What about solar? Oh, they considered that they say, the Sun makes no difference, see their chart in figure 1 from AR6.[1] Solar is assumed to be zero and volcanism is small, thus the model assumes all recent warming is due to humans, then draws the same conclusion in a perfect example of circular reasoning. But what if the solar forcing is not zero? What difference does that make?

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John Constable’s talk at Universidad de las Hespérides

By Andy May

h/t Wim Röst

The Universidad de las Hespérides is in the Canary Islands, off the coast of Morocco. The Hespérides are the nymphs of the evening and golden sunsets, so I imagine it is a beautiful location to travel to. Dr. Constable’s talk can be viewed in full here. The beginning is in Spanish, but they turn to English about 4 minutes in.

His talk is about our energy economy and how it has evolved over time. He makes the critical point that fossil fuels are a very high-quality energy source and have produced a very wealthy and high productivity world. As a result, the medieval hold that landowners had over the peasants of a feudal society was broken. Land ownership in the past controlled the food supply, since travel and food transport were prohibitively expensive and time consuming. Controlling food meant the landowners (lords and kings) controlled, and basically enslaved, the general population.

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Australia Warns Ferries about EVs

By Andy May

h/t Don Keiller and Ken Gregory

Australia’s Maritime Safety Authority has issued a domestic commercial vessel safety alert on the risks of ferrying battery powered cars (EVs), download it here. Each ferry operator must conduct a risk assessment for their vessel to ensure that they are capable of dealing with potential EV fires. They list the risks of carrying EVs as follows:

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Can extreme heat make parts of the Earth too hot for humans?

By Andy May

In another “How the hell did this paper pass peer-review?” incident we find yet another PNAS absurdity by Daniel Vecellio and colleagues (Link), that is described by a truly awful summary in Science Daily here. The paper tells us, correctly, that any wet-bulb temperature above 35°C is dangerous for humans. This particular temperature is dangerous because that is when our bodies lose their ability to cool themselves. The wet bulb temperature is the lowest temperature that air can be cooled to by the evaporation of water. Consider it our external body temperature, in direct sunlight, while sweating.

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Leah Stokes, PNAS, and Conflicts of Interest

By Andy May

Leah Stokes is the senior author of a new paper in PNAS, Prevalence and predictors of wind energy opposition in North America, in which she blames White people for opposing wind projects. She goes on to say that “…wealthier, Whiter communities [opposition] leads to continued pollution in poorer communities, and communities of color.”

There is evidence that offshore wind projects, or at least the geophysical site surveys required for building them, harm whales. The fact that these geophysical surveys can harm whales is well known and regulations prohibit the surveys, but numerous authorizations for surveys [waiving the rules] for renewable wind projects have been granted anyway. There is also evidence that wind turbines can harm our health, due to the low frequency sounds they produce. Thus, there are good reasons to protest wind turbine development, whether the protestor is White or not.

Stokes claims in her paper that she has “no competing interest.” This was accepted by the editor of the paper, Michael Mann. Yet her podcast, “A Matter of Degrees,” has received the following donations from organizations that support wind power:

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The McKnight Foundation supports wind power and moving away from fossil fuels, the same is true of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the Schmidt Family Foundation. Stokes is also a policy advisor to Evergreen Action, and a senior policy counsel to Rewiring America, an organization promoting the electrification of the USA.

As I asked Google Bard recently:

“A connection to the renewable industry is OK and not biased, but to the fossil fuel industry it is. This seems to be bias.”

This forced Google Bard to admit that:

“Both the renewable energy industry and the fossil fuel industry have a vested interest in the climate change debate.”

Thus, Stokes appears to have a competing interest, that could lead to bias in her paper. Advocates of wind are financially supporting her podcast. According to the PNAS rules, a financial interest may include:

“…membership on a standing advisory council or committee, service on the board of directors, public association with the company or its products, … compensation as a spokesperson, … or financial support.”

Do I need to ask why she left out her competing interests, or why Michael Mann accepted the paper with the “no conflict of interest” statement?

h/t Willie Soon and Matthew Nisbet.

Marcel Crok Speaks in the Danish Parliament

By Andy May

Clintel’s Marcel Crok gave the Keynote Lecture at the Climate Realism conference: The Climate Emergency is Canceled. The conference was in Copenhagen, Denmark in their beautiful Parliament building. His presentation is in English (Marcel’s English is very good) and his presentation can be viewed on Youtube here.

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Can Google Bard AI Lie?

By Jonathan Cohler, Andy May, and Willie Soon

Here we ask the question, can AI lie? It seems so. AI (artificial intelligence), is based on neural networks. The theory of learning and adaptive neural networks was first developed in the 1940s, probably by Donald Hebb, a Canadian psychologist, who described a process of learning that became known as Hebbian learning. The process was adapted to machines in the late 1940s and eventually into modern AI.

A pure AI algorithm, based only on neural networks and information from the internet, cannot lie, but as we will see, it can be programmed to lie and deceive the user. In addition, AI products can make mistakes (see some examples of mistakes in my previous post) and even have hallucinations. But these are not the topics we will cover today, today we are discussing deliberately and knowingly lying. That these products do this, is important to understand if you want to use them.

Microsoft now has Open AI, originally funded in 2015 by Elon Musk and several other entrepreneurs, with Microsoft joining the group as the principal funder in 2019. The Open AI project spawned the large language [programming] model (LLM) called GPT-4 that was used to create ChatGPT, which is used inside Microsoft’s Bing.

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A Conversation with Google Bard on the Consensus

By Andy May

It turns out it is trivially easy to get Google’s AI product “Bard” to admit it is biased about climate change. Others, like Jonathan Cohler have managed to get “Bard” to admit it lied. I didn’t get that far, but I did get it to admit to bias. The last portion of my transcript is pasted below. I added the references and the bibliography afterward.

It was kind of fun arguing with the Bard. It isn’t that smart, at least not right now, and it contains a lot of bias, so give it a try. The conversation below only took about ten minutes.

You can reach Google Bard at bard.google.com.

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Climate scientists admit they have a 90% chance of being wrong about Arctic sea ice

Guest Post by Javier Vinós

Arctic sea ice is lowest during the month of September, and its average extent during this month is a useful metric for measuring Arctic sea ice decline during the current period of global warming. During the 1980s and 1990s, September Arctic sea-ice extent (SIE) showed a moderate decline (Figure 1). After the 1997 climate shift, which involved a rather abrupt global atmospheric reorganization, the Arctic entered a period of rapid change that I call the Arctic Shift.[1] During this period, Arctic SIE declined more rapidly. Scientists noticed this change in trend about a decade later and became increasingly concerned about the prospect of an ice-free Arctic.[2]

Figure 1. September Arctic sea-ice extent since 1979. The blue area indicates the period of rapid change named the Arctic Shift.
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