Recent Updates

Andy May 3:46 pm on November 26, 2021  

Help, what is happening with our universities?

By Prof. Dr. IR. Guus Berkhout

This is an English translation of a letter by Guus Berkhout of CLINTEL that was published in De Telegraaf, the largest newspaper in The Netherlands earlier this week.

In recent years we have seen the strangest things happening to our universities. Professors must be extremely careful about what they teach. If they present scientific results that do not fit the ideology of activist movements, their lives are made difficult and they even run the risk of being excommunicated. Joining the consensus is by far the safest. The Boards of Governors do not protect their professors; on the contrary, they are solidly behind the activists.

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Andy May 3:13 pm on November 13, 2021
Tags: autocorrelation, CO2, Durbin-Watson, Temperature   

Autocorrelation in CO2 and Temperature Time Series

By Andy May

In my last post I plotted the NASA CO2 and the HadCRUT5 records from 1850 to 2020 and compared them. This was in response to a plot posted on twitter by Robert Rohde implying they correlated well. The two records appear to correlate because the resulting R2 is 0.87. The least square’s function used made the global temperature anomaly a function of the logarithm to the base 2 of the CO2 concentration (or ‘log2CO2‘). This means the temperature change was assumed to be linear with the doubling of the CO2 concentration, a common assumption. The least squares (or ‘LS’) methodology assumes there is no error in the measurements of the CO2 concentration and all error resulting from the correlation (the residuals) resides in the HadCRUT5 global average surface temperature estimates.

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#autocorrelation, #co2, #durbin-watson, #temperature

Andy May 2:56 pm on November 8, 2021  

CO2 and Temperature

By Andy May

I had a very interesting online discussion about CO2 and temperature with Tinus Pulles, a retired Dutch environmental scientist. To read the whole discussion, go to the comments at the end of this post. He presented me with a graphic from Dr. Robert Rohde from twitter that you can find here. It is also plotted below, as Figure 1.

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Andy May 9:31 am on November 6, 2021  

Temperature Regulated Cooling Dominates Warming and Why the Earth Stopped Cooling At 15°C

Guest Post by Wim Röst

Abstract

It is said that the Earth’s surface temperature variations are controlled by [human-induced] greenhouse gases1. This is not the case. When cooling systems dominate, surface temperatures are set by the cooling system and not by the system that is warming the surface. On Earth the surface cooling system dominates; temperatures are set by the natural cooling system. The strength of natural surface cooling is set by temperature. Adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere does not make any difference for surface temperatures. Their initial warming effect is neutralized by extra surface cooling and by a diminished uptake of solar energy. The cooling system dominates.

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Andy May 12:50 pm on October 30, 2021  

Holocene CO2 Variability and Underlying Trends

Guest Post by Renee Hannon

Introduction

This post compares CO2 data from Antarctic ice cores during the Holocene interglacial period with other publicly available CO2 datasets. Antarctic ice CO2 is regarded as the gold standard for paleo-atmospheric global CO2 during past interglacial and glacial periods. Antarctic CO2 does capture the multi-millennial underlying trend; however, short-term centennial trends are not evident. By examining a wider range of CO2 data from Greenland ice and plant stomata, a more complete picture of past natural centennial CO2 fluctuations emerges.

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Andy May 8:14 am on October 9, 2021  

The Old Farmer’s Almanac Seasonal Forecasts

By Andy May

The Old Farmer’s Almanac has been making yearly long-term weather forecasts for 230 years. We pay attention to them because they are normally 80% accurate. They did not do as well last winter but were 72% in predicting the direction of temperature change, and 78% accurate in the change in precipitation. This is pretty remarkable because while the U.S. weather forecasts are 90% accurate five days in advance, they are only 80% accurate seven days out. The Old Farmer’s Almanac forecasts are far less specific, they only predict the direction of change, but their forecasts are for twelve months in the future, quite impressive. Figure 1 is their forecast for the lower 48 United States, for this winter.

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Andy May 4:25 pm on September 20, 2021  

The Greenhouse Effect, A Summary of Wijngaarden and Happer

By Andy May

This post was updated 9/24/2021 to reflect reader comments.

The phrase “greenhouse effect,” often abbreviated as “GHE,” is very ambiguous. It applies to Earth’s surface temperature, and has never been observed or measured, only modeled. To make matters worse, it has numerous possible components, and the relative contributions of the possible components are unknown. Basic physics suggests that Earth’s surface is warmer than it would be with a transparent atmosphere, that is no greenhouse gases (GHGs), clouds, or oceans. If we assume Earth is a blackbody, then subtract the solar energy reflected, from the hypothetically non-existent clouds, atmosphere, land, ice, and oceans; we can calculate a surface temperature of 254K or -19°C. The actual average temperature today is about 288.7K or roughly 15.5°C. This modeled difference of 35°C is often called the overall greenhouse effect.

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Andy May 10:34 am on September 14, 2021  

European Energy Prices set Records

By Andy May

According to the Wall Street Journal yesterday, due to a rare lack of North Sea wind, already high European energy prices are climbing higher.

“Gas and coal-fired electricity plants were called in to make up the shortfall from wind.

Natural-gas prices, already boosted by the pandemic recovery and a lack of fuel in storage caverns and tanks, hit all-time highs. Thermal coal, long shunned for its carbon emissions, has emerged from a long price slump as utilities are forced to turn on backup power sources.”

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Andy May 1:23 pm on September 10, 2021
Tags: 1060   

False and misleading “fact check” about Connolly, et al., 2021

By Andy May

Dr. Ronan Connolly and his co-authors respond to obvious false claims, in a supposed “fact check” about their latest paper on how solar variability may be affecting the climate. We applaud Dr. Ronan Connolly, Dr. Willie Soon, and Dr. Michael Connolly for rapidly and publicly calling out this fraudulent fact check. Misinformation and opinion articles disguised as fact checks are all too common and when they receive support in the left-wing social media, the situation just gets worse.

Their response follows:

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#1060

Andy May 1:23 pm on September 4, 2021  

Nature promotes frivolous lawsuits

By Andy May

A Dutch joke*:

“The Judge asks an attorney pleading his case: ‘Am I ever to hear the truth?’

The attorney responds: ‘No, my Lord, only the evidence.'”

It is safe to say that no evidence exists that man-made climate change has harmed anyone. Further man-made climate or climate change has never been observed or measured. Climate-related and extreme-weather-related deaths, whether natural or man-made, have declined 93% since their peak in the 1920s and 1930s. Extreme weather events have declined and their impact on humans has declined even faster. Deaths due to climate change (man-made or natural) reached their lowest point in recorded history in 2019.

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