Environmentalism is a religion

The late Dr. Michael Crichton was wonderful writer. In 2003 he presented a wonderful essay in San Francisco equating environmentalism to religion. Nobel prize winning physicist Dr. Ivar Giaver makes the same point in a presentation here. In religion man is meant to be saved from the consequences of his sins. In the environmentalist religion the world was a wonderful, beautiful Eden until man and his technology came along. Man has eaten the apple and lost Eden. Now we must give up our “evil” technology and go back to nature, otherwise all is lost.

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Can Earth be compared to Venus?

By Andy May

This post was updated 11/27/2020

We are often confronted with the idea that if the carbon dioxide level in the Earth’s atmosphere gets too high we will suffer from a “runaway greenhouse effect” and the Earth will become like Venus. This would be catastrophic. The temperature on the surface of Venus is roughly 737K (464°C or 867°F). It is hotter on the surface of Venus than on the daytime side of Mercury! In addition, Venus has very thick clouds of sulfuric acid. It is not a hospitable place. Could the Earth “go runaway” and become like Venus with the addition of more carbon dioxide to our atmosphere? James Hansen famously wrote in 2009, page 236:

“. .. if we burn all reserves of oil, gas, and coal, there’s a substantial chance that we will initiate the runaway greenhouse. If we also burn the tar sands and tar shale, I believe the Venus syndrome [the runaway greenhouse] is a dead certainty”

Could this be true? He got the idea by studying Venus. Is Venus “runaway?” Figure 1 is a profile of the Venusian atmosphere from a 2010 post by Steve Goddard. The graphic is originally from AstronomyOnline.org.

Figure 1. The Venusian atmosphere.
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Comparing early 20th Century warming to late 20th Century warming

By Andy May

This post was updated August 25, 2015 to clarify the text on sea surface temperatures, provide a correlation coefficient between the two warming periods and to discuss the Planck parameter.

Many writers, including Professor Richard Lindzen and Ed Caryl have noticed the remarkable similarity in global warming observed from around 1910 to 1944 and 1975 to 2009. The similarity in slopes exists in all global surface temperature datasets. Figure 1 shows the HadCRUT version 4 dataset and the NASA GISS land (GHCN v3) and ocean (ERSST v4) temperature dataset. We’ve identified the two periods of interest on the figure. All datasets also show some cooling between 1945 and 1975.

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The May Book

A record of the May genealogy compiled by Jeremy (Jerry) Pine can be downloaded here.  This is a result of many years of work by Jerry.  As with any family this large this record is already outdated, but it contains a lot of great information.

Below is the earliest photograph of a May.  Isaac May was born in Kentucky September 7, 1814.  He  migrated to Decatur County Indiana prior to 1832 and to DeKalb Missouri in 1839.

Isaac_May
Isaac May, born September 7, 1814 and died February 21, 1873.

Review and Summary of “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels”

By Andy May

The best-selling book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels was first published November 27, 2014 by Penguin. The author, Alex Epstein, took a BA in Philosophy from Duke University in 2002. He is the President of the Center for Industrial Progress, a former fellow of the Ayn Rand Institute and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He was also named as one of the top 10 in Rolling Stone’s 2013 “Global Warming Denier Elite.” High praise indeed! He was fourth on the list.

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Politifact or Politi-fiction?

By Andy May

This is a critique of the coverage of the man-made climate change debate by Politifact.com. It’s an update of a post I wrote last year. Journalism has not improved in the last 19 months and may actually be worse. Because Politifact is often characterized as an unbiased and credible source by the rest of the media it must be held to a very high standard. This is why finding two well documented cases of the organization deliberately mischaracterizing the facts and misquoting sources on the climate change debate is so shocking. As a result of these “fact checks” it is annoying that the press cites Politifact as if it were objective and honest, it is neither.

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The Kerr-McGee Bohai Bay Block 0436 20 year Reunion

Those of us that worked to obtain block 0436 in Bohai Bay, China and were involved in the discoveries met today (July 28, 2016) in Greg Cleveland’s beautiful Memorial Area home for a 20th anniversary celebration of the first discovery. Quite a few were able to come. The block has gone back to the Chinese government now. But according to Jeff Pan, the last production manager in the Beijing office before the turnover, 150 million barrels of oil were produced! This far exceeds the minimum amount of oil production we computed before the field was developed. Below are some pictures from the party, click on any of the pictures to download a high resolution version.

If any other attendees have good pictures to share, please email them to me and I will add them to this post. I will also be adding some historical photos as soon as I can obtain good descriptions of them.

A brief history

In the early 1990’s Mark Seely noticed that onshore oil production around Bohai Bay went right up to the water’s edge and then stopped. This gave him the idea that if Kerr-McGee could get production rights in the bay we would have a good chance of a discovery. The early exploration team was formed in 1993 and it included Mike Patterson, Mark Seely, Gene Murray, and myself (Andy May). There were others, but they didn’t make the party. We got the block in 1994, the first discovery was a non-commercial oil test, the CFD 2-1-1, in July of 1996. It was this event that we were celebrating. The next discovery was the CFD 11-1-1 in November of 1999. It was proven commercial after much work, many beatings, fights and angst. Right up until first oil was produced from the field the Kerr-McGee Manager of Reserves, Kurt McCaslin, would tell anyone who would listen that Bohai would never make a profit. But, it turned out that the field moved into profitability after only six months of production!

Below is a group picture taken by Greg Cleveland:

From the top, then left to right: Bao Ming Zheng, Lin Yang, Don Turner, Andy May, Debbie Casares, Mike Patterson, Ling Duan, Ian Roberts, John Campion, Mark Seely, Michael Verm, Joan Verm, Greg Cleveland , and Eugene Murray.

Click to see more pictures

Facts and Theories

By Andy May

There is an updated version of this post here.

Sometimes people ask climate skeptics if they believe in evolution or gravity. They want to ridicule our skepticism by equating man-made climate change to evolution or gravity. Evolution and gravity are facts and man-made climate change is a hypothesis. Equating “climate change” to gravity or evolution is valid, as all three are facts. Climate changes, gravity holds us to the Earth’s surface and species evolve. Gravity and evolution have generally accepted theories of how they work. Einstein developed our current scientific theory of gravity. Newton provided us with his descriptive “Law of Gravitation.” Newton’s law tells us what gravity does and it is very useful, but it tells us nothing about how it works. For that we need Einstein’s theory of relativity. Theories and laws are not necessarily related in science. A law simply describes what happens without describing why. A scientific theory attempts to explain why a relationship holds true.

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Lake Woodlands, The Woodlands, Texas

Lake Woodlands sits in the heart of The Woodlands, Texas. It is a large lake, 1.6 miles long, 0.25 miles wide and covers roughly 225 acres. No power boats are allowed, but it is great for canoes and kayaks. The fishing is good and sometimes, especially in the winter, you can see a family of bald eagles.

I shot the South Shore video from South Shore Park and the West Shore video from North Shore Park. The video was filmed with a DJI Phantom III Drone. All of the filming was done in June, 2016. The music is all by Kevin MacLeod and was downloaded from his web site.

The two videos can be viewed by clicking on the images below:

Figure 1 is a map of the lake from Google Earth.

Figure 1

Comparing the Kobashi and Alley Central Greenland Temperature Reconstructions

By Andy May

In 2000, Richard Alley released an ice core temperature reconstruction for Central Greenland using Oxygen isotope ratios. He describes the technique used here. I used this ice core proxy data in a previous post “Climate and Civilization for the past 4,000 years.” Since Alley’s data stops at 1855, I spliced the Greenland HadCRUT surface temperature data on the end to show the Modern Warm Period. In the previous post I erroneously thought Alley’s reconstruction stopped at 1905, not at 1855, so the plot in the earlier post is shifted 50 years. This problem is corrected in this post. I spent too little time on the splice, since my focus was on the effect of climate on civilization and several commenters rightly objected to the error. These included David Middleton, who offered up a better Central Greenland reconstruction by Kobashi, et al. as an alternative. A little research and I was able to find a 4,000 year reconstruction to 1993 by Kobashi et al.

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