Climate Change and Photography
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:
Continue reading “Australia Warns Ferries about EVs”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.
Continue reading “Can extreme heat make parts of the Earth too hot for humans?”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:
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.
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.
Continue reading “Marcel Crok Speaks in the Danish Parliament”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.
Continue reading “Can Google Bard AI Lie?”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.
Continue reading “A Conversation with Google Bard on the Consensus”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]
By Andy May
The argument about the proper way to estimate error in the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF) ERA5 weather reanalysis dataset between Nicola Scafetta and Gavin Schmidt has finally been published by Geophysical Research Letters. Schmidt, Jones, and Kennedy’s comment is here (Schmidt, Jones, & Kennedy, 2023), and Scafetta’s response is here (Scafetta N., 2023a).
I first wrote about this dispute earlier in the year here. Nothing much has changed in the final versions.
Schmidt, Jones, and Kennedy’s assessment of the error in the ERA5 surface temperature dataset average still (incorrectly) assumes that, during such a period, the global surface temperature was constant from 2011-2021 and that its yearly variability is due to random noise. This is clearly a nonphysical interpretation of Earth’s climate, since there are real systematic changes in the climate from year to year, whether one assumes they are due to natural or man-made forces, or both.
Continue reading “More on the statistical dispute between Scafetta and Schmidt”By Andy May
Open letter to the authors of the Wall Street Journal article: “Inside Exxon’s Strategy to Downplay Climate Change,” by Christopher M. Matthews and Collin Eaton.
Dear Mr. Matthews and Mr. Eaton,
I was quite surprised to see your article in the news section of the September 14, 2023 issue of the Wall Street Journal and not in the opinion section. It is quite misleading, and along the lines of the fully debunked Supran and Oreskes article in Environmental Research Letters (2017, v. 12, no. 8). As I discuss in a blog post this idea was thoroughly destroyed by Kimberly Neuendorf in court.
Like Supran and Oreskes, you assume that Exxon is one being with one mind, which is very far from the truth, as I research in detail in this blog post. The causes of climate change are not known, and as a result, the spectrum of opinions within Exxon is as large as that in the general public.
Some people are under the illusion that climate change is fully understood, that humans somehow control it, and it is dangerous. All these ideas are conjecture and without foundation, as explained in this post.
You can believe what you like, but conjecture is not fact, and Exxon is not a person. Your news article is based on faulty assumptions and too much conjecture, it belongs in the opinion section.
Regards,
Andy May
Andy May Petrophysicist – Climate Change and Photography
By Andy May
Our new book, The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC: An Analysis of AR6, is creating a lot of attention and excitement around the world. It is the first authoritative critique of the new IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) climate change report, “AR6.” AR6 ignores all climate change research that goes against their narrative and agenda, we show you what they are hiding in this book.
Continue reading “The Buzz about The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC”
