Climate Change and Photography
By Andy May
We hear a lot about the AMO, or the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. How much does it influence the global mean surface temperature or GMST? Exactly what is the AMO? These are the issues we will discuss. First let’s look at various definitions of the AMO.
Continue reading “Musings on the AMO”What does the April 2025 Spanish power failure tell us about how we compare solar and wind to stable fossil fuel and nuclear power generation?
By Andy May
Global energy demand and consumption rose 2.2% in 2024 to a record high according to the 2025 IEA Global Energy Review released in March 2025. Growth in fossil fuel consumption accounted for 54% of the growing demand and growth in renewables and nuclear power accounted for the remainder. Most of the consumption growth was in emerging nations. The total energy supply for 2022-2024 is given in Table 1.
Continue reading “Energy Consumption in 2024 and the Spanish Power Failure”By Andy May
This post has been translated into German for those who prefer it here.
In my last post I discussed the evolution from the ICOADS raw sea surface temperature (SST) data to the final ERSST and HadSST SST anomalies. These anomalies are compared in figure 1. The ICOADS anomalies are generated by subtracting the 1961-1990 mean value from all the final raw simple yearly means. This was done last after the simple global mean SST had been computed for all years.
Continue reading “The Weather and Climate of World War II”By Andy May
This post can be read in German here.
The global average SST (Sea Surface Temperature) is a very important component of the global average surface temperature for the simple reason that the global ocean covers almost 71% of Earth’s surface. So, we downloaded the gridded SST data from 1850 through 2024 from the Hadley Centre (HadSST v4.1), NOAA (ERSST v5), and NOAA’s SST data repository (ICOADS v3) and then plotted the data in figure 1.
Continue reading “What is the Global Average SST?”By Andy May
This post has been translated to German by Christian Freuer here.
In this post I examine the proxies used to compare CO2 to temperature from 66 million years ago (Ma) until today and comment on the quality of the comparison. In addition, we look at the Cenozoic plate tectonic events that affected global climate. Figure 1 compares Westerhold et al.’s deep-sea d18O (the Oxygen-18 isotope anomaly, a temperature proxy) to the d13C (the Carbon-13 isotope anomaly), both measurements are from the same fossils, so they can be directly compared. One of the problems with many temperature/CO2 plots is often they are from different sources and locations and due to dating errors and differing temporal resolutions, they are not directly comparable. While d13C is not a direct CO2 estimate, it is related to the CO2 concentration in the deep ocean. Atmospheric and ocean CO2 concentration estimates are compared to d13C in figure 2.
Continue reading “Plate Tectonics and Climate during the Cenozoic”By Andy May
The overall greenhouse effect (GHE) is often defined as the difference between Earth’s average global temperature without greenhouse gases (GHGs) and with them. Greenhouse gases are all the gases that absorb some portion of the thermal energy emitted by Earth’s surface. The most important of these gases is water vapor, but there are minor GHGs like CO2, ozone, and methane.
Continue reading “The Earth without Greenhouse Gases”By Andy May
No one doubts that Americans have lost faith in our government bureaucracy and the news media. The Pew Research Center, as well as other polls, confirm that public trust in the government has cratered, as shown in the image above. It rebounded during the Reagan and Clinton presidencies but has remained very low (~22%) since the George W. Bush presidency.
Continue reading “The Public has lost faith in Government & the Media”By Dr. Heinz Hug | Aug. 20, 2012
Translated and lightly edited by Andy May and google translate, the original German post is here.
Update 25.9.12
Due to the extremely active discussion, Dr. Hug has revised his article again. What is difficult to understand is presented in a more understandable way and any missing information is added.
Quite obviously, the effect of the anthropogenic greenhouse effect is greatly overestimated, because the CO2 greenhouse effect was already exhausted in Goethe’s time, except for insignificant, spectroscopically justifiable residual amounts (“peak flanks”). Because of the extensive “saturation effect,” the anthropogenic share of greenhouse gases is of minor importance in current climate change. Rather, the variance of Earth’s surface temperature is due to cloud cover, which in turn depends on fluctuations of the solar magnetic field. A larger cloud cover of the globe has about the same effect as volcanic ash after an eruption. The influence of cloud cover can only be depicted extremely inadequately with the IPCC climate models. Climate models are also a spectroscopic artifact because they must work with arbitrary flux corrections, the amounts of which exceed those of the anthropogenic greenhouse effect many times over.
Continue reading “The anthropogenic greenhouse effect – a spectroscopic triviality”By K. Schwarzschild, January 13, 1906.
Translated by Dr. Markus Ott, 2025
In the opinion of Karl Schwarzschild, “Radiation equilibrium will occur in a strongly radiating and absorbing atmosphere, in which the mixing effect of ascending and descending currents [convection] is insignificant compared to heat exchange by radiation.” Ed.
The surface of the sun shows us in granulations, sunspots and prominences (protuberances) changing conditions and stormy changes. In order to understand the physical conditions under which these phenomena exist, the first approximation is to substitute the spatial and temporal changes with a mean stationary state, a mechanical equilibrium of the solar atmosphere. So far, the so-called adiabatic [without transferring heat between the system and the environment] equilibrium, as it exists in our atmosphere when it is thoroughly mixed by ascending and descending currents [convection], and in the foreground of consideration.
Continue reading “Schwarzschild: About the equilibrium of the solar atmosphere”by Dr. Heinz Hug, 1998
Lightly edited by Andy May
Summary 
Laboratory measurements of the infrared absorption of carbon dioxide using an FT-IR spectrometre suggest that the radiative forcing for CO2 doubling must be much less than assumed by climate scientists until now. A reduction factor of 80x is likely.
Continue reading “The Climate Catastrophe – A Spectroscopic Artifact?”
