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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Facebook “Fact Checks” Prof. Will Happer

By Angela Wheeler

The only way to combat censorship is to shine a light on it whenever we see it.

In censoring material that contradicts the popular – though increasingly feeble – fiction of a climate crisis, Facebook is quick to discount the credentials of one of the world’s leading scientists while honoring sources of dubious credibility.

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The errors and misstatements in “Climate Denialism”

By Andy May

The featured image is by Josh, used with permission.

There are 20 clearly false statements and three additional problematic statements in Tinus Pulles’ “Climate Denialism.” Most of them stem from disagreements on how to interpret existing data. However, some are due to his lack of understanding of what we wrote or, intentional distortion of what we wrote. What is puzzling is I was asked to peer review this paper months ago and I sent in the review in October. Nearly all the errors you will see in the list below were pointed out then, yet they remain in the paper. To nearly everyone familiar with climate science literature and our paper, these errors are obvious. I find it more than a bit alarming that even the grammatical errors I pointed out in the paper last October are still in it. Why such a flawed paper was published is a mystery. Peer review is not working as intended.

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The AJES Response to May & Crok

By Andy May

The featured image is the key figure 2 from May & Crok.

This post is mostly a list of errors and misinformation in the AJES (The American Journal of Economics and Sociology) board’s response by Ted Gwartney and Alexandra Lough to May & Crok. But first I applaud the board’s decision to formally publish the paper they invited May & Crok to write for their special climate change edition. The paper they asked us to write (already published online) was intended to explain the science behind the “climate denial” point of view, and it accomplished that.

The paper has received a lot of criticism, see the links at the end of this post for our response to each critique. The critiques all fall into two categories:

  1. May & Crok are correct that there is no sign of any unusual global danger from man-made climate change today, but just wait! The climate models say there will be dangers in the future.
  2. I don’t see any errors or flaws in May & Crok or in the references, but you must be wrong because the “consensus” of climate scientists say you are wrong.

The AJES board’s criticism, by Gwartney & Lough falls in the second category. May & Crok is a straightforward and honest look at the state of climate today, and the paper simply points out, and the AR6 WGI report agrees, that there are no signs of any dangers from man-made climate change now or in the immediate future.

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Drought in the Southwestern U.S.

By Andy May

The featured image is a photograph of the Big Bend area in Texas in October 2015 when the drought index was moderately moist. The photo was taken by the author.

Stories of some sort of current catastrophic drought in the western U.S. are greatly exaggerated (apologies to Mark Twain). While the western U.S. is dry due to its location under a zone of perpetual high atmospheric pressure and little rain, the present drought conditions in the region are moderate by historical standards. This post is mostly an update of two earlier posts by Anthony Watts here and here. Watts’ posts have stood the test of time quite well. It is amazing how often the “consensus” recycles old, debunked myths.

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Climate Models, Clouds, OLR, and ECS

By Andy May

To read this post in German see here, translation by Christian Freuer.

The IPCC and the climate “consensus” believe that essentially all warming since 1750 is due to man’s emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases as shown in figure 1 here or in (IPCC, 2021, p. 961). This has led to a 45-year search for the value of the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity to the doubling of CO2 (“ECS” in °C per 2xCO2). Yet, after spending 45 years trying to calculate the sensitivity of climate to man-made greenhouse gases, the “consensus” has been unable to narrow the uncertainty in their estimates and, if anything, the climate model uncertainty is now larger than in earlier reports(IPCC, 2021, p. 927). It is now clear, at least to me, that modern climate models make many critical assumptions that are poorly supported and sometimes conflict with observations. This is an attempt to explain some of these problems and how they developed over time. It is long past time for the “consensus” to stop ignoring the obvious weaknesses in their 60-year old conceptual model of climate.

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Comment on Cobb, 2024

By Andy May

The featured image for this post is from Angela Wheeler at the CO2 Coalition, used with permission.

This post is a comment on Cobb, 2024, the paper is entitled “The politics of climate denialism and the secondary denialism of economics.” The paper defines climate denialism, discusses the reasons it exists, and the effect of widespread “denialism” on society. The paper was written in response to a paper I wrote with my colleague Marcel Crok, entitled “Carbon dioxide and a warming climate are not problems,” the abstract for our paper is here and the full text can be downloaded here. I am responding to Cobb’s paper primarily to correct some misinformation in it regarding our paper and Exxon’s climate research efforts. Unfortunately, the paper is paywalled and quite different from the abstract. I asked Cobb several times for a copy, via email and through ResearchGate, but he never responded to my requests, so I bought a pdf from Wiley.

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Climate Change over the past 4000 Years

By Andy May

I last wrote about Climate Change and Civilization for the past 4,000 Years in 2016. Since then, a lot has changed, and I’ve learned a lot more about the subject. First, we learned that various air and sea temperature proxies, such as ice core δ18O or tree rings, are all different. For a discussion of some temperature proxies used and the problems with them, see here. Proxies have different accuracies, they are often sensitive to the temperature of different seasons, and they have different temporal resolutions. Thus, as pointed out by Soon and Baliunas in 2003, they are all local and “cannot be combined into a hemispheric or global quantitative composite.”

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Natural Climate Change Factors

By Andy May

“Consensus” scientists do not believe that solar variability, internal climate variability (in this model simplified to the ~67-year stadium wave), or volcanism influence net global warming or climate change since 1750, yet considerable evidence exists that these factors have an impact. I’ve previously built a model of the HadCRUT5 global average temperature (see here) from seven known climate and solar cycles using multiple regression and was reasonably successful.

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