The Weather and Climate of World War II

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.

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What is the Global Average SST?

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.

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Plate Tectonics and Climate during the Cenozoic

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.

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The Earth without Greenhouse Gases

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.

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The Public has lost faith in Government & the Media

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.

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The anthropogenic greenhouse effect – a spectroscopic triviality

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.

Summary: 

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.

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Schwarzschild: About the equilibrium of the solar atmosphere

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.

I. Contents.

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.

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The Climate Catastrophe – A Spectroscopic Artifact?

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.

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Energy and Matter

By Andy May & Tom Shula

Revised Feb. 3, 2025 due to reader comments and for clarity.

Figure 1 was added Feb. 4, 2025.

Fundamentally the entire man-made CO2 global warming concept, boils down to the interaction of energy and matter in Earth’s atmosphere. The only reason that CO2 and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) are special is that they absorb most of the radiation emitted by Earth’s surface. Water vapor absorbs across almost the entire emission spectrum and is, by far, the most significant absorber. The cloud-free atmosphere is mostly transparent to sunlight, so Earth’s surface absorbs most of the sunlight that makes it through the clouds. In response to this stimulation, it emits infrared radiation (IR).

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Uli Weber´s Hemispheric Stefan-Boltzmann model.

By Markus Ott

I assume that most readers are aware that the 33°C overall greenhouse effect (GHE) is the product of an arithmetically and physically incorrect calculation. It inappropriately averages the insolation evenly over the entire surface of the Earth, as if it were flat and not a rotating sphere, and then uses this average of approximately 240W/m2 to calculate the mean surface temperature for an earth without an atmosphere via the Stefan-Boltzmann law, see page 97 in AR4 here. This physically incorrect mean-value calculation produces a mean surface temperature for an earth without an atmosphere of -19°C. Based on this incorrect result an overall GHE of 33°C (14 – -19) is postulated to explain the measured mean near surface temperature of about 14°C.

Here I present a model by Uli Weber that produces a surprisingly good estimate for the mean near surface temperature of the earth simply by fixing the problems in the arithmetic of the calculation described above.

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