Climate Change and Photography
By Andy May
The IPCC references global mean temperature increases to the 1850-1900 mean (IPCC, 2021, Ch. 2&4), and radiative forcing increases to 1750 (IPCC, 2021, Ch 7), then uses the two numbers to help them model warming since the pre-industrial period. According to Pages 2K the world warmed 0.1 to 0.2°C (see figure 1) between 1750 and 1850-1990 (Pages2K, 2019). AR6 (p 150) estimates a change of 0.1°C (-0.1 to 0.3°C):
Continue reading “What is the Best Human-Centric Climatic Baseline?”
By Andy May
President Trump is no politician in the more general sense of the word. He isn’t careful about what he says and speaks his mind. His nature, in my opinion, is to tell the truth as he sees it and, in that sense, he is very honest, just not very diplomatic. So, again in my opinion, it is odd that the New York Times and much of the news media try to portray him as a liar, since that seems to be against his nature. Much of the public appears to share my view, since while the news media’s allegations have undoubtably hurt Trump’s approval rating and his standing with some of the public, they seem to have hurt themselves even more. As recently as the 1990s the news media were generally thought of as the arbiters of truth, but as shown in figure 1, public confidence in them as a group has fallen recently to historic lows. According to Gallup, in 2025, 70% of the public say they have little or no confidence in the news media.
Continue reading “Alleged Trump Lies”
By Andy May
Trump often claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him or it was improperly run. The news media responds to these claims by saying that there is no proof that the election was rigged or stolen. When pressed, some in the media will admit that fraud existed in the 2020 election, but that it was not enough to affect the election results. I’m not here to tell you who is right or wrong in this seemingly endless debate, just to present the facts as we know them.
By Andy May
From my perspective, the Democratic Party, the FBI, the Intelligence community, and the so-called deep state launched unprecedented legal attacks against Trump, his friends, supporters, and family after he won election in 2016. The attacks were supported by multiple news media organizations, although no evidence of news media/deep state coordination has been found. As I show in this post, all the attacks were arguably illegitimate, and this was so blatant and obvious that it damaged the reputations of the government and news media organizations that participated in them and arguably increased the public’s support of Donald Trump, helping him win in the 2024 elections.
By Andy May
I first read about Deployable Energy on Joanne Nova’s website and was very interested in their innovative small modular nuclear reactor and how it worked. The reactor was produced under President Trump’s 2025 nuclear reactor plan. It was designed by Australian Bobby Gallagher and his team in Houston. It can produce one megawatt of power, at a cost of 15 cents per kilowatt hour, for five years before refueling is required. The entire reactor can fit on the bed of a Ford F150 pickup, as shown in the photo. More importantly, it can be manufactured in a factory, fits into one 20-foot shipping container, uses the existing conventional supply chain, and requires no exotic custom-made components.
By Andy May
This is part 3 of a series on defining temperature. In part one I covered various temperature definitions used and pointed out that “temperature,” unmodified is only a measurement of an emergent statistical property with little meaning beyond that. It is important in physics and daily life, but not a primitive well defined property like mass or energy. In part two I covered kinetic temperature, which is “what we measure with a thermometer” (Schroeder, 2000). In the original X discussion that spurred me to write these posts, some argued that the “real” definition of “temperature” was the thermodynamic equilibrium temperature. Of course this is not true. For nearly everyone on Earth, thermometers measure temperature.
By Andy May
In my last post, “Defining Temperature,” we saw that temperature is a simple measurement that has little meaning without context. If one is referring to the equilibrium system state variable or “thermodynamic equilibrium temperature,” they should state that to provide clarity because there are many types of temperature measurements and they mean different things. Thermodynamic equilibrium temperature is defined in the previous post. There are many definitions of temperature, I will discuss the most common ones used in physics and everyday life in this post and perhaps in subsequent posts. The fundamental meaning of thermodynamic equilibrium temperature and the temperature measured with a thermometer are very different and they should not be confused.
By Andy May
I never thought I would participate in a serious debate on the definition of “temperature.” But it happened on twitter, and with people who have degrees in physics and other hard sciences! Since I worked with kinetic and effective temperature estimates for 42 years as a petrophysicist, I knew these topics intimately and never gave them a second thought. So, to hear people say (paraphrasing) that they were not really temperatures came as a shock. Their proposed sole definition of “temperature:” is the thermodynamic statistical definition:
By Andy May and Philip Mulholland
IGRA2 radiosonde 1991–2025 means (10 hPa bins, 10° latitude slices) show systematic differences between observed mid-tropospheric temperatures, and the CMIP 5 & 6 (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, see IPCC, 2021) ensemble means as shown by McKitrick & Christy (2020) and Po-Chedley et al. (2022). The difference between the CMIP models and the observations is most noticeable in the tropics as discussed here. While multiple reasons, such as too much weight on the warming effect of additional CO2, anomalous cloud feedback, or bad weather balloon data, have been proposed (IPCC, 2021, p. 443), no one really knows why they are so poor at reproducing tropospheric temperature profiles.
By Andy May and Philip Mulholland
Earlier this year Philip Mulholland published the details of his Dew-Point Anchor Hypothesis or “DPAH” (Mulholland P. , 2026a). The hypothesis assumes that the Dew-Point Lifting Condensation Level (LCL), as calculated from surface conditions in the tropics, can act as an anchor for the lower and middle troposphere. This idea moves the independent variable in climate modeling from the radiative balance at the top of the atmosphere (TOA), to the cloud level inside the troposphere.
