The real reason why Trump is killing the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawai'i When you don't like the message, what do you do? You shoot the messenger, of course. That's the strategy being employed by U.S. President Donald Trump's administration as it works to avoid, ignore, or bury data that prove the reality of anthropogenic global warming and its evil twin climate change. Case in point: The Trump …
reading lies, half-truths, and outright propaganda and buying into the lies are two different things.
It's like saying "YOU are NOT LISTENING" when in fact, I hear just fine. I'm DISAGREEING!!!
"But, But, 1+1 is clearly 3, you MUST have something WRONG with you if you cannot see it, you must NOT have read the article and are obviously NOT LISTENING"
^^^ kinda like that.
You didnt read either then... As usual
Of course he didn't. Reading skills are not approved for use by the Repub lunatic fringe [1] and BomBob is firmly in that camp..
[1] Used to be a minority. Nowadays? Not so much. More a "lunatic majority" rather than a fringe.
Let's put a CO2 measuring station in close proximity to highly active volcanism.That's a great idea!
Actually it was, because that was the data Keeling was studying, ie the volcano. Then demonstrating why OCD can be a good characteristic in a scientist because he diligently took a lot of samples that gave the world the Keeling Curve, which demonstrates the natural biological responses to a warming world. Then people confuse cause and effect, and don't understand that the natural carbon cycle vastly dominates any human contribution. You can also see this in the way the data shows the seasonal variations in CO2 levels. If the increase was entirely due to anthropomorphic CO2 emissions, those would flatten out given the increased human emissions during winter.
But the biggest problem with climate 'science' vs actual science is the way activists try to spin the data. So-
Among the many cuts to NOAA research proposed in the draft was one that would represent a death blow to the Mauna Loa Observatory
From the article, along with the misleading title. And from NOAAs budget requests introduction-
For Fiscal Year (FY) 2026, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) requests a budget of $4,515,302,000 in discretionary appropriations
So it's NOAA killing the MLO, not Trump. And although Rik and I have differences of opinion wrt climate science, I think this is bad. The 'science' says that CO2 is a 'well-mixed gas' so for Global Warming, it doesn't really matter where it's measured and the Keeling Curve will live on. It'll just be like a lot of climate 'science' and get new observations spliced on. Actual science though, ie instruments like OCO-2 that can measure CO2 concentrations from space show it's not that well-mixed and there are high spots, and low. Replacing Mauna Loa data with data taken from say, somewhere with higher natural or unnatural CO2 emissions could be used to manufacture another Hockey Stick.
But the reason why the Keeling Curve has been useful is its consistency. It's also a bit like how sunspots are measured. We have much better instruments for counting sunspots, but the official numbers are still based on Wolf numbers and observations taken with antique instruments so there's a consistent record going back a few centuries..
That also gets interesting wrt volcanos, and theories that solar activity can drive volcanic.. Which is interesting, but I have my doubts. Gases from volcanos are sampled directly however, hence there's little dispute about volcanic contribution to rising CO2 levels. There's just not enough CO2, even though there have been some occasional suprises, like discovering Mt Erebus in Antarctica emitted more CO2 than previously thought, and some fascinating cave ecology that's shown adaptation to very high CO2.
" If the increase was entirely due to anthropomorphic CO2 emissions, those would flatten out given the increased human emissions during winter."
You seem to be under the impression that winter is something that happens globally at the same time, and that all countries have a usage pattern commonly seen in colder climates.
You seem to be under the impression that winter is something that happens globally at the same time, and that all countries have a usage pattern commonly seen in colder climates.
You'd make a great climate 'scientist', leaping to conclusions without any evidence. But have a clue here-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zonal_and_meridional_flow
which goes back to the idea that CO2 is 'well-mixed'.. And we live on a real planet, not in a climate 'scientists' simulation. So CO2 levels sampled in the southern hemisphere show the same seasonal variation, thus again showing the natural correlation between temperature and CO2.
Stop waffling and get to the point. Are we to believe that human activity does not (cannot?) materially affect temperature or climate?
On a planetary scale? Nope. We're just along for the ride. Even though we emit a large (and uncertain) amount of CO2, that's pretty much lost in the noise (or uncertainty) around the whole planet's carbon cycle.
But you can also test this theory at home. Get yourself a meter that can measure CO2 concentrations and a thermometer. These can be pretty cheap & get used in activities like caving. Then get yourself a tank of CO2, or if you like to live dangerously, a box of dry ice. Then shut your doors and windows, crack open the CO2 and observe the temperature increase as you raise CO2 levels to say, 5000ppmv. That's reasonably safe and you won't spontaneously combust. If using dry ice, be ready to run for fresh air because dry ice will displace oxygen and you may suffocate. But in doing so, you'll be saving the world from around 250kg of CO2e that we humans produce annually just by breathing.
The results should show you why greenhouse operators don't use CO2 for heating, even though according to the 'Greenhouse' theory, it should work.
all humor aside, 20000 ppm (around 2%) is about the maximum safe amount of CO2 in air (assuming enough O2). On a sub, the CO2 scrubbers generally keep CO2 below 2%, though they are ineffective below about 1%.
When it gets above 2% people get headaches and become grumpy. Up to 5% before it gets REALLY bad. I think toxicity is above 7%, could be wrong though. In the movie Apollo 13 they were yelling at one another as CO2 levels kept rising, no doubt a contributing factor if that part is historically accurate.
Unfortunatelly, much lower CO2 level have nondesirable effects on humans. For example - currenlty good office/workplace CO2 level ( for normal workday) is lower than 1000 PPM. And this is assuming You recover after it on lower levels. People have different adoption levels , but i can confirm, that i get head aches and brain-fog when working more than 3h in near 800 PPM... There is bigg differencies betwen short time allowed max levels and living and working constantly in high CO2 level.
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/co2-comfort-level-d_1024.html
Anyone who wants a model for the greenhouse effect should step into a greenhouse in daytime and note that it is warmer in than out.
Well, that's because the 'Greenhouse Effect' was badly named. Greenhouses have walls and a roof. Planets don't. Heat is lost via conduction, convection, evaporation and radiation, with CO2 only acting really on 1 of these and delaying radiation away to space by a fraction of a second. Water vapor is a far, far better 'Greenhouse Gas', but obviously isn't as profitable.
So still doesn't explain why, if CO2 is so brilliant at 'trapping' heat, we're not using it for heating or insulation.
This post has been deleted by its author
"... Heat is lost via conduction, convection, evaporation and radiation, ..."
I think you missed class. Heat is not "lost" - it's only moved from one medium to another.
"So still doesn't explain why, if CO2 is so brilliant at 'trapping' heat, we're not using it for heating or insulation."
So again, missed class.
You are so focused on CO2, the gas, you forget to look at infrared radiation from the sun and how IR and CO2 interact.
Might be time to go back to class and look at thermodynamics.
I think you missed class. Heat is not "lost" - it's only moved from one medium to another.
Not me.. Heat is lost because we don't live in a greenhouse, there is no roof so the heat is ultimately lost as it radiates away into space.
You are so focused on CO2, the gas, you forget to look at infrared radiation from the sun and how IR and CO2 interact.
You really haven't been reading my posts, have you? I keep saying that the multi-trillion dollar question is being able to precisely quantify those interactions, and that over the history of climate science and modelling, those have generally been quantified downwards. But you also demonstrate that you don't even understand the first principles. Variations in the IR component of the Sun's output will obviously have a direct affect on CO2 interactions. But what you don't seem to understand is CO2 dogma is based on roughly 800W/m^2 reaching the surface, ie TSI which includes all wavelengths, visible and invisble. So Sun heats the surface, surface re-radiates some energy as IR back to space and CO2 delays that energy escaping by a tiny fraction of a second. CO2 has 4 absorption/emission points, only one (the 'atmospheric window') that doesn't overlap with H2O, hence H2O being the dominant 'GHG' by a wide margin.
Might be time to go back to class and look at thermodynamics.
I suspect you've never even been in a physics class, otherwise you wouldn't have so confidently stated that heat isn't lost.. You really should learn some (very basic) thermodynamics and you'd quickly realise that if it wasn't, and we get 800W/m^2 energy entering our planetary system.. If that heat/energy wasn't lost, we'd be an awful lot hotter and would never have evolved..
Both northern and southern hemispheres show a marked cycle through the year as each move through their respective plants growing seasons... the global average is skewed towards the northern hemisphere by the increased land mass.
The seasonal variation is on the order of 10ppm, whereas we've added ~100ppm since decent measurements started in ~1960.
That's a huge swing, and for the last 100,000 years or so it's a great increase than we've seen, to levels which were already higher than at any previous time (measured from ice core samples) because of the Industrial Revolution.
But don't let facts get in the way of an oil addled drinking session.
hiow can humans add CO2 to the atmosphere when CO2 is at equilibrium with the hydro cycle, oceans, lakes, plants, etc. and its production from volcanoes and respiration [and some from burning things]?
The atmosphere is NOT a BUCKET. And it is NOT an isolated system. To think a molecule of CO2 once made by burning oil STAYS and ACCUMULATES is a denial of established science, particularly CHEMISTRY. If you think I'm WRONG, just go back and study equilibrium reactions. When you understand what a PHOSPHATE TITRATION ANALYSIS is, and how to determine total phosphate concentration from it, then you'll understand why CO2 is at equilibrium.
"hiow can humans add CO2 to the atmosphere when CO2 is at equilibrium with the hydro cycle, oceans, lakes, plants, etc. and its production from volcanoes and respiration [and some from burning things]?"
It's more like humans doing things that modify the carbon cycle that has the effect of raising the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere. If vast tracts of cheap productive farmland is paved over for new low-income housing (a non-sensical statement), humans chip away at natural carbon capture. Pave over the Sahara for housing and it's not the same effect. If ocean biota is killed off, that's a huge carbon sink that gets turned off.
You think, or are paid to repeat, that an equilibrium is a magically fixed point, and that the addition for instance of cargo to a ship which is floating with its weight in EQUILIBRIUM with the upthrust from the water it's hull has displaced, will not cause it to find a new equilibrium, a bit deeper, thus with more water displaced, and more upthrust providing an equal and opposite force to the increased weight.
At some point adding more cargo etc causes this situation to change, suddenly, and catastrophically. There's a line on the ship, named after Plimsoll.
It's quite a good analogy, but all analogies are moderately bad.
You really cannot comprehend the most basic of principles.
Fossil fuels are carbon based deposits that were created either by vegetation build up to turn into coal or small creatures that h a similar process to turn into oil.
That is all CO2 that was removed from the atmosphere over millions of years. This also occurred millions of years ago.
Humans the dug it up and burnt it in 150 years putting all the CO2 back into the atmosphere.
From the Wikipedia page on the Keeling curve:
"The Keeling Curve also shows a cyclic variation of about 6 ppm each year corresponding to the seasonal change in uptake of CO2 by the world's land vegetation. Most of this vegetation is in the Northern hemisphere where most of the land is located."
It's not just the global distribution of vegetation that is biased toward the Northern hemisphere, but the distribution of population. Particularly those affected by colder weather.
Also those affected by warm weather...
But what you're really saying is "the earth is big and well balanced", no we can't tip it over in one day, but we've had a couple of hundred years of pushing pretty hard, and we're still doing so.
The increase in atmospheric CO2 is not something we can ignore if we want to live on a planet that looks much like this one.
Actually, the seasonal variation in the Keeling curve puts the whole "CO2 is a persistent problem" to a lie. It turns around and heads down on an annual basis. And it responds to inputs with a time constant on the order of weeks or at most a month or so. It is also responding to something that is seasonal. Be it natural (vegetation cycles) or anthropogenic (people turn up the heat during their winter), it is less likely to be due to transportation, which isn't as seasonal. But then none of this fits the standard AGW narrative.
'That's not "oh it turns around every six months"'
It can, if we change the inputs. There is a persistent story that CO2 remains in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. So we've got to do something _now_ to prevent coasting through some hypothetical point of no return like a downhill train with no brakes. That's just fear-mongering and it's not what the Keeling curve shows. That's not to say that nothing needs to be done. But it shouldn't stop critical examination of proposed solutions. Because some of those solutions are just ways to pad people's pockets.
It's got brakes, but they can only do so much. That means you don't let the speed get up because at that point you effectively have no brakes.
If we completely stopped burning fossil fuels today (which is unlikely) then we're still on track to see a significant change in the global climate (we're already seeing it).
It's got brakes but very little inertia. Much less than the climate terror people claim. But then one has to cry "Panic!" if one is trying to sell a solution and then skip town before the customer discovers that they have bought a lemon. The parrot isn't dead. It's just resting.
The AGW science is correct. Their engineering sucks.
You seem to be under the impression that winter is something that happens globally at the same time, and that all countries have a usage pattern commonly seen in colder climates.
Trying to use common sense and logic with JE is doomed to failure for several reasons:
1. It won't *actually* read what you have written other than in a cursory fashion to determine the points it can use to sneer at you
2. It's dedicated its time to semi-literate trolldom. It reflexively rejects anything not approved by the MAGA thought-virus and then spends lots of electrons trying to justify that position.
In short, not worth the time and braincells used in responding to it.
1. It won't *actually* read what you have written other than in a cursory fashion to determine the points it can use to sneer at you
Oh, it does. It also realises that common sense and logic are alien concepts to loony lefties.
But in case anyone wants to know a bit more about Mauna Loa and their CO2 observations, read this-
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/04/under-the-volcano-over-the-volcano/
In short, not worth the time and braincells used in responding to it.
And yet you do. Typically without adding anything interesting to the conversation, just throwing more insults. It's almost as if you have no knowledge on the subject. TDS can have that effect I guess.
"And yet you do. Typically without adding anything interesting to the conversation, just throwing more insults. It's almost as if you have no knowledge on the subject."
I see a significant reflection here...
Well, provide some actual peer reviewed evidence that explains why we are seeing rapidly rising CO2 levels, and rapidly increasing global temperatures, and why these aren't linked to our conspicuous consumption of fossil fuels and the associated unfetter pollution of our atmosphere.
>https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/04/under-the-volcano-over-the-volcano/
The conclusion of that article:
I’m about as skeptical as anyone I know. But I think that the Mauna Loa CO2 measurements are arguably the best dataset in the field of climate science. I wouldn’t waste time fighting to disprove them, there are lots of other datasets that deserve closer scrutiny.
And your conclusion: That the data isn't worth the electrons used to move it around?
Throwing around terms like "TDS" (Trump derangement syndrome) and "lefty loonies" whilst suggesting that other people are "just throwing insults" would be funny if I thought that you were capable of recognising your own actions.
Well, provide some actual peer reviewed evidence that explains why we are seeing rapidly rising CO2 levels, and rapidly increasing global temperatures, and why these aren't linked to our conspicuous consumption of fossil fuels and the associated unfetter pollution of our atmosphere.
Here's a really simple explanation-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok_Station#/media/File:Vostok_420ky_4curves_insolation.jpg
CO2 lags temperature. Again, to be expected because biology and the carbon cycle cranking up whenever it warms. Again the trillion dollar question is the relative contributions between natural and unnatural CO2, and then the effect on temperatures. The reality denier's argument is that all the CO2 since the end of the LIA is unnatural, therefore all the warming.. Even though observations show that that argument is bollocks. Especially given the collosal uncertainties around how much CO2 is emitted naturally. There are some issues around ice cores given the differences in ice vs gas age, and diffusion rates through snow and ice. But even though the quantities may be off, the trends seem broadly reliable.
And your conclusion: That the data isn't worth the electrons used to move it around?
Nope. You're just showing a very bad habit often used by the TDS-addled. Those are your words, and your conclusion.. not mine. In fact in my first response to this article, I said that I thought the Keeling Curve should be maintained for consistency. And then reading more, like Forrest Mimms article and comments from other scientists who've either worked their or use their products. the whole MLO should be retained. I think it should be retained because it's one of the longest record of observations, and although there are other CO2 observations, their data is shorter.
Plus if you actually dig into the MLO's CO2 data and compare that with temperatures, you'll see the CO2 record is a lot 'noisier' than the typical smoothed curve and can plot that against temperature.. Which someone at WUWT did and again shows CO2 lagging. Which is a bit like the old 'Rain follows the plough' idea. Cause needs to preceed effect to be valid, not lag it.
Throwing around terms like "TDS" (Trump derangement syndrome) and "lefty loonies" whilst suggesting that other people are "just throwing insults" would be funny if I thought that you were capable of recognising your own actions.
I've said it before and I'll say it again.. I use TDS deliberately, especially when posters are showing obvious symptoms. Like blaming Trump for NOAAs decision to close the MLO. Or just the way loony lefties blame Trump for everything. Plus I think there's an interesting correlation between faith-based tribalism and heavily politicised subjects like Global Warming dogma. Believers also seem to believe in other far-left conspiracy theories, like Trump being a Putin puppet, or Russia stealing the election from Hilary.. even though current events seem to be showing that was a conspiracy theory created by Obama and Clinton, who may now face criminal charges for election interference or sedition.
But if people hurl insults in my direction, I'll generally respond in kind. If posters are civil, then so will I be..
"So it's NOAA killing the MLO, not Trump"
Bloomin' 'eck!
Talk about trying to split hairs while having his cake and eating it!
What the Eel tried to wriggle out of saying is that it is TRUMP'S NOAA killing the MLO.
What dingbat thinks the any government operates by having the chief executive make _all_ the decisions personally?
In this case, Trump picked Howard Lutnick as SecCommerce for his sterling work supporting the "stolen election" lies, fundraising for Trump, and for his stupidity in agreeing that tariffs are a splendid idea. Lutnick theb picks the head of NOAA that agrees to parrot the Glorious Leader's idiocity, and never suggest that the Emperor's New Cloths might be... unusual.
What dingbat thinks the any government operates by having the chief executive make _all_ the decisions personally?
You and Rik I guess, along with anyone else who thinks that Trump is going through every line item in NOAA's budget and budget request with a big red pen.
Lutnick theb picks the head of NOAA
Nope. President nominates, then Senate confirms, not Lutnick.. and you might be suprised to learn that Laura Grimm came into NOAA having previously been Director of Oceans at the WWF.
"Nope. President nominates, then Senate confirms, ..."
You're being (probably deliberately) obtuse. The President nominates people who are like minded on policy. The Senate who confirms them (if they even bother) are controlled by the same party. Trump doesn't have to go through the budget line by line, and that was never the implication.
You're being (probably deliberately) obtuse. The President nominates people who are like minded on policy.
Just trying to explain some facts to the conspiracy theorists here. So any idea why Trump would nominate somone who came from the WWF? Seems an odd choice when the WWF are firm Global Warming believers, and dogma promoters.
Ah, so you acknowledge that when you stated that it WASN'T Trump but NOAA that's defunding the observatory, you were misstating the facts, i.e. you were being a dingbat.
The Trumpbat instructs, others implement, who's responsible?
Ding, ding, ding!
And, poor delusion dingbat: we've established that your supreme overlord Trump doesn't do everything himself (because he's not competent, apart from anything else), so what REALLY happens is that Lutnick proposes, Trump agrees, and then Senate rubber stamps. Possibly Lutnick is "guided" by Trump's minders (Miller?) to propose an individual that's been suitably obsequious or butt-kissy, but that's a distinction with no real difference.
And no, I wouldn't be surprised about Grimm. But I'm (not really) surprised why you think the Chief of Staff of NOAA is relevant to this issue? Yes, Ms Grimm came to NOAA from WWF. But she's the ACTING head, until the Senate confirms the nominee (and you jolly cleverly outlined the process, smart boy!) and in the meantime she's just the caretaker.
The nominee is Dr Neil Jacobs, who's principal claims to fame include trying to pressure meteorologists to support the Orange Overlord's stupidity about the path of a storm (Hurricane Dorian, as it happens) and the notorious Sharpie incident, as well as other examples of dumbness (see e.g. https://blog.ucs.org/rachel-cleetus/we-watched-neil-jacobs-confirmation-hearing-for-noaa-administrator-and-are-concerned-about-what-we-heard/).
And no, I wouldn't be surprised about Grimm. But I'm (not really) surprised why you think the Chief of Staff of NOAA is relevant to this issue? Yes, Ms Grimm came to NOAA from WWF. But she's the ACTING head, until the Senate confirms the nominee (and you jolly cleverly outlined the process, smart boy!) and in the meantime she's just the caretaker.
So you're using a lot of words to basically say I was right, and NOAA created the budget request, not Trump? So it isn't actually Trump that's killing the MLO. And if there are other CO2 monitoring stations scattered around the USA, activists will still be able to point at a graph still climbing. But as the budget request also prioritises funding for the NWS, NOAA might actually install weather monitoring stations that meet WMO climatology guidelines.
Then being an optimist, perhaps the UK could do the same thing and have the Met Office fix this kind of problem-
https://www.climateskeptic.org/p/suspicions-mount-as-met-office-continues
In the last 10 years to the middle of 2024, 81.5% of new sites were junk Class 4 and 5 operations with potential internationally-recognised errors up to 2°C and 5°C respectively. Incredibly, eight of the 13 newly-opened sites over the last five years were of junk status.
Which is evidence I guess of man-made warming, it's just not the way most people think or would expect the 'scientists' at the Met Office to behave. It gives them the ability to churn out press releases claiming temperature 'records' set at those junk sites. And if those junk sites are removed from temperature series and only Class 1 or 2 sites used, as if by magic, most of the Global Warming vanishes..
Because Trump and his goons have cut their budget in at least half.
The Texas floods were made worse by the lack of people to issue the warnings thanks to the budget cuts.
Just wait for the first Cat 4 or Cat-5 hurricane to hit a red state. The lack of NOAA and the decimation of FEMA will (not could) cause a red state to go TITSUP because Trump wants the states to fund all the things thar FEMA did.
Don't go to FLA, ALA or any SE state before November.
The Texas floods were made worse by the lack of people to issue the warnings thanks to the budget cuts.
Oh dear. Yet another lie from the lefties. The NWS had extra people and issued warnings. Problem was most people were asleep and didn't hear them.
Trump will blame the agencies for deliberately messing up their rescue efforts because they are lefty communist deep state operatives that hate trump, and those MAGA who no longer have homes, floating in the sewage ridden flood water will believe it.
*They* are the ones who have a deranged relationship with trump.
This post has been deleted by its author
So the problem IS the expense. Perhaps private funding would continue the analysis. We really do NOT need it, in the face of several billion dollars of the people's tax meoney.
I still do not like how the data is ABused by warmists when they clearly ignore the saturation of CO2's effect, that CO2 lags temperature when plotted over time, that ice core data shows many times higher CO2 levels in the past, and even the chemistry realities of CO2 solubility in water vs temperature and how CO2 levels below 200 ppm would kill most plants.
Anyone believing in CO2-based climate change has to IGNORE A **LOT** OF OBVIOUS SCIENCE **FACTS** THAT ARE INDISPUTABLE...
So is it your contention that doubling the CO2 in the atmosphere will have no effect? What was the world like when the ice cores showed 'many times higher CO2'? Aren't you making an argument for spending the money to understand what is happening rather than blocking the research so we have no idea?
Fact 1: CO2 evolution in the atmosphere
Fact 2: Evolution of Global surface temperature
Fact 3: Evolution of sea surface temperature
Fact 5: Sea level rise
Tout va très bien, Madame la Marquise, tout va très bien, tout va très bien !
Putting quotes round the word scientist shows your bias and invalidates your argument.
Nope. No more than calling anyone who disagrees with the Global Warming dogma a 'denier' does. If a person doesn't follow the scientific method, then they're not scientists. Instead, they're activists who'll happily spread information using pseudoscience. Rik does this a lot-
If it weren't for that greenhouse-gas blanket, simple physics (the Stefan-Boltzmann black-body equations, for you fellow physics nerds) proves that the Earth's temperature would average about -15°C (5°F).
Like much climate 'science', this is a very crude equivalance used to draw a false conclusion, but it sounds sciencey to people who aren't physics nerds-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_body
A black body or blackbody is an idealized physical body that absorbs all incident electromagnetic radiation, regardless of frequency or angle of incidence. The radiation emitted by a black body in thermal equilibrium with its environment is called black-body radiation. The name "black body" is given because it absorbs all colors of light. In contrast, a white body is one with a "rough surface that reflects all incident rays completely and uniformly in all directions."
The Earth isn't, and never really has been a black-body. Instead, we're living on a blue-green planet with an ever changing albedo that orbits a variable sun. It has oceans, atmosphere that have never been in thermal equilbrium and instead is a dynamic heat engine that transports energy from the equator polewards. So the Gish starts with a false equivalence and then happily gallops on. Mars and Venus aren't black-bodies either. One has very little atmosphere, no magnetic field and no oceans. The other has a lot of atmosphere.
But this is how climate 'science' works, or the old saying that BS baffles brains.. At least until brains wake up and go "That's bollocks!" and then people with some knowledge of physics often become sceptics, and might start asking why Global Warming activists lie so much. Especially in the face of overwhelming evidence. The S-B meme though gets used to plant the seed that there's some theoretical ideal temperature and that a mythical 'thermal equilibrium' has been peturbed since 1850 when we started adding CO2 to the atmosphere thanks to the Industrial Revolution.
The reality is that CO2 is a weak GHG, and the IPCC states this. Physics is physics, and the humble CO2 molecule can't be anything else. The reality is that the Earth has experienced climate changes in the past, so Ice Ages, large and small. CO2 can't explain these, but we know that CO2 increases following warming because biology & chemistry. The LIA ended, the Earth warmed. This is a very Inconvenient Truth*, so the climate 'scientists' and reality deniers just try to pretend that the LIA never happened. Or only happened in some bizarre Heisenberg fashion where we observed it.. Which in normal science would require explaining how, exactly we ended up with so many pockets of colder than 'equilbrium' climates.
But no. The UN wants their $100bn a year to fight the War on Warmth. Other scammers want to make more billions flogging pre-Industrial windmills, that can't reliably charge EVs. Or just commit massive frauds trading carbon indulgences.
*This is one of the fascinatiing bits of real science. Like we know about past climate changes like the LIA, MWP, RWP, the other MWP and the big Ice Ages.. But we don't really know why those happened, or why the climate changed back. CO2 can't explain those, at least not based on the evidence that's been found so far.
*sigh* this is is where the anti-science evangelists like JE "triumph".
Note the claim has been subtly elided to actively acknowledge that the climate _is_ changing, but it's not our fault. They then shrilly screech that the climate has changed in the past (duh! Ice ages, anyone?) so it doesn't matter and we shouldn't do anything about it.
This denialist pattern is exactly the same as e.g. noting that thermal springs often contain high levels of geogenic arsenic, so we may as well dump toxic waste into them.
To put it another way, even if mankind is only directly (i.e.. Ignoring things like widespread deforestation) responsible for X% of the climate change, what evil turdbat would oppose reducing that X%? In mathematics: if Z is the total climate change, and X is the proportion due to anthropomorphic factors, Y being the rest, then X+Y = Z, and reducing X reduces Z, and fewer people die.
*sigh* this is is where the anti-science evangelists like JE "triumph".
Nope. The evangelists triumph by repeating assorted BS, getting people to believe them and then trousering billions.
They then shrilly screech that the climate has changed in the past (duh! Ice ages, anyone?) so it doesn't matter and we shouldn't do anything about it.
Nope. The shrill screeching comes from people like Greta 'How Dare You!!!!!!!' Thunberg and assorted useful idiots supergluing themselves to roads. Sceptics point out that things like the Little Ice Age really happened. So then warming back up to MWP levels following the LIA isn't really much of a suprise. The useful idiots of course screech that the LIA didn't happen, and this time it's different and all the fault of a trace gas. They even point at graps showing CO2 increases, and ignore the lack of correlation to temperature.
To put it another way, even if mankind is only directly (i.e.. Ignoring things like widespread deforestation) responsible for X% of the climate change, what evil turdbat would oppose reducing that X%? In mathematics: if Z is the total climate change, and X is the proportion due to anthropomorphic factors, Y being the rest, then X+Y = Z, and reducing X reduces Z, and fewer people die.
Or we can put it another way. Ed Millibrains way in fact. So Net Zero. It'll cost the UK around £2tn or more to hit that 'legally binding' target. Which will mean widespread deforestation and general destruction of the landscape to cover it with windmills and solar panels. And from memory, and using the generally accepted 1.5C warming per doubling of CO2.. Will reduce UK temperatures by around 0.0002C and the global temperature by even less.
And because of the collasal cost, achieving Net Zero will mean that more people die because they can't afford to heat & eat. Of course if you're scamming some of that $2tn, you won't have this problem. Energy costs increase food, energy and the price of pretty much everything. Inflation continues to climb, all to achieve a goal that can't be measured.
No-one predicted a 125 feet rise. And you know it.
By the way, look up how the gravity differences of earth due to its uneven mass, and how the effects of the earth spinning mean that sea level rise (which has been scientifically measured as happening) is not uniform, and tends to have a greater affect as you get closer to the equator.
The highest point in Florida is 8m above sea level.
Britton Hill, Florida, is 105 meters above sea level, though it's virtually in Alabama. Sugarloaf "Mountain" in central Florida is 95 meters high. St. Petersburg in Florida has a high point of 18.6 meters.
So, it is possible for Beast666 to co-locate in their maternal parent's Floridian basement.
Have you been to Mauna Loa? I have. It's a dormant volcano, not an active one. The active ones are quite far from it and there is quite a lot of wind there. If there was contamination, they would not sample there, simple as that. Even if the goal was to falsify the climate debate, the readings would be too erratic from sporadic activity and the readings would go up and down. In that case, might as well make up numbers entirely.
Am I overloading the two brain cells?
Am I overloading the two brain cells?
By Jove, I think you've made an accurate self-diagnosis! But if you take swift action, you might save one of your remaining cells..
Have you been to Mauna Loa? I have. It's a dormant volcano, not an active one. The active ones are quite far from it and there is quite a lot of wind there.
Hmm.. I think you're demonstrating another problem with climate 'science'. It may have been dormant when you visited, but...
https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/
NOTE: Due to the eruption of the Mauna Loa Volcano, measurements from Mauna Loa Observatory were suspended as of Nov. 29, 2022. Observations from December 2022 to July 4, 2023 are from a site at the Maunakea Observatories, approximately 21 miles north of the Mauna Loa Observatory. Mauna Loa observations resumed in July 2023
Mauna Loa kinda did the eruption thing and took out the road to the observatory. Luckily it didn't take that out. Which could be another reason why the Observatory is being closed because being perched on the side of an active volcano can be a tad hazardous to health & safety.
Jellied Eel, I stand much corrected on assuming you never have anything intelligent to say. Congratulations and an upvote.
You found out that the CO2 had been an issue, temporarily. I stand corrected.
And, it was solved by suspending observations for the duration, till the local perturbations went away. Climate isn't really concerned with a 7 month gap, so that's probably OK
Moving the entire shebang elsewhere risks that you now are comparing, to some extent anyway, apples and oranges. CO2 somewhere is not necessarily the same thing as CO2 somewhere else.
But maybe, since you are so concerned with scientific observations and not getting gulled by those dastardly climate scientists, you can suggest the location for an additional monitoring stations? Antartica?
And, it was solved by suspending observations for the duration, till the local perturbations went away. Climate isn't really concerned with a 7 month gap, so that's probably OK
The observations weren't suspended, they were moved to sample at the same altitude in a very similar location that was still dormant. CO2 wasn't the concern at MLO, it was Mauna Loa erupting and lava flows destroying the road to the observatory.
I used to drink with a volcanologist and did at one point consider packing myself off to Royal Holloway to study it. But they told a story of why they gave up field work. They were part of a team studying Mount St Helens when that erupted. Luckily they were on the far side to the eruption, but had friends and colleagues who weren't as lucky. As they put it, there aren't many old & bold field volcanologists and it can be one of the most dangerous fields of science. Which includes the politics where they can be damned if they do raise alarms that turn out to be false, and damned if they don't and there's an eruption.
But maybe, since you are so concerned with scientific observations and not getting gulled by those dastardly climate scientists, you can suggest the location for an additional monitoring stations? Antartica?
The challenge for climate science is mostly just a statistics problem, and people like Shannon and Nyquist answered those a long time ago, ie basic sampling theory. So sampling needs to be representative to give enough data to draw meaningful conclusions. Which for climate science is complicated by dealing with processes on long to very long timescales. So the standard climatological interval is 30yrs. So it would be nice to cover the globe with CO2 sensors, take samples at different altitudes, and not forgetting the oceans. Then in perhaps 300yrs of regular sampling, there might be enough data to draw meaningful conclusions.
Which is also the problem with people drawing false inferences from the Keeling data. That shows CO2 levels have increased since it started, but it doesn't explain why. Which is then the correlation != causation argument, especially when other data like ice cores appear to show that CO2 levels increase following warming.. Which is to be expected given the natural carbon cycle. This is still really a causation issue. There's billions to be made taxing & trading carbon, or generating billions in subsidies from promoting pre-industrial technology like windmills. The whole thing has become extremely polarised and politicised. Normal scientific method like a null hypothesis gets shouted down as 'denial'. NOAA spent billions on Sim Earth models, and can't produce reliable basic temperature data.
Plus I think there's a CO2 monitoring station at McMurdo anyway, which from memory shows lower CO2 levels than Mauna Loa because Antarctica is basically a desert & so to be expected. Plus there's a safety argument. Like if CO2 levels start falling, and continue to fall, everyone dies. Which is one of the silly aspects around proposals to actually decarbonise the atmosphere. Most life evolved when CO2 levels were far higher than today, and if the decline continued.. it would be really bad. Instead, we're getting the benefits of a 'Greening of the Earth'.
No one sensible is proposing that. Yet another straw man.
You're both right and wrong about that. The whole point of Net Zero and things like carbon capture scams is to reduce CO2 levels back to pre-industrial times. This isn't sensible, but it's what useful idiots like Ed Millibrain is trying to achieve with our money. Starmer wants inflation reduced and looks at Rachel from accounts. She looks at Ed, who shrugs and carries on tilting at windmills.
The single biggest factor in inflation* is our energy costs because that's an input cost to everything. Scrapping subsidies and cutting energy costs would reduce inflation, along with energy poverty, food poverty, excess winter mortality from people who can't afford to heat and businesses closing due to high energy costs.. But no, the government is doing the exact opposite and increasing the amount of subsidies to the latest capacity auction because wind farmers want more money.
*Another significant factor is good'ol fagflation. Tobacco is still in the basket of goods used to calculate RPI. Successive rounds of sin taxes have massively increased the price of tobacco, so RPI inflation follows. Then because wind farmers have indexed contracts, electricity prices go up because tobacco duty has increased. Unless wind farmers are very heavy smokers, this is obviously bonkers because tobacco isn't an input cost to wind farming. So another obvious solution would be to say, halve tobacco duty and because that's now a big-ticket item in the basket of goods, RPI inflation would fall with the stroke of a pen.
But then inflation is one of those weird policy issues. Target is to make everything at least 2.2% more expensive every year because that inflates GDP and makes the UK look like the economy is growing, even when it isn't and just leads to inevitable stagflation due to rising costs. If government was actually sensible, it should be looking at a decade or two of deflation to make the UK economy more competitive. And again, energy is an obvious way to do this, especially as UK energy costs are now amongst the highest in the world thanks to our insane energy policies.
It must be noted that Mauna Loa is, indeed, an active volcano. However, it must also be noted that it's huge, accounting for a bit over fifty per cent of the entire island of Hawai'i. The 2022 suspension of the measurements from the Mauna Loa Observatory was done primarily for reasons of limited access during the road closure, not for fear that the eruptions would endanger the Observatory itself. And may I gently suggest, Mr. Eel, that salting your observations with insults weakens rather than supports your arguments.
The 2022 suspension of the measurements from the Mauna Loa Observatory was done primarily for reasons of limited access during the road closure, not for fear that the eruptions would endanger the Observatory itself.
Or just lack of road. But would you want to be the NOAA administrator who authorised sending staff back up an active volcano when pretty much everything being done there can be automated? How much of NOAA''s budget would you allocate to liability insurance or contingency funds for future payouts?
And may I gently suggest, Mr. Eel, that salting your observations with insults weakens rather than supports your arguments.
The thing about both climate science and climate 'science' is both involve projection. Remind me, who was it who wrote-
To clarify his anti-science goals for this "reconsideration" effort, Zeldin recruited to this effort the justly marginalized climate-science deniers John Christy and Roy Spencer.
If you stop using the phrase 'denier' to describe actual climate scientists, then maybe I won't remind you about the great Mann and his recent court loss where he was sanctioned by a judge for fabricating evidence. Many sceptics already knew this, but it's good to have actual facts entered into evidence.
Mauna Loa has recent activity as I understand. Last major eruption in 2022, and there is some gassing and seismic activity within the last month. But the effects of volcanic gassing is not always from the cinder cone. Surrounding soil for MILES can emit gasses, which is one reason that total CO2 from volcanic activity is hard to measure, depending...
I'm glad at least A FEW PEOPLE are paying attention, instead of chasing Henny Penny around and believing her "sky is falling" UNSCIENTIFIC HYSTERIA!
CO2 is NOT the "Climate Control Knob". Its effect on temperatures was saturated OVER "200 ppm ago".
The USA is NOT buying the self-shooting-foot AGW via CO2 nonsense. We have TONS of carbon-based fuel, it is high quality and cheap, and windmills are SILLY but if Don Quixote must tilt them over "climate change" he can do it SOMEWHERE ELSE.
We'll be the ones burning carbon-based fuels and nuclear fuels to power AI for the future!!! AND, NOBODY is going to STOP us with these LIES about CO2 and AGW "climate change"!
Carbon is the 4th most abundant element in our solar system. The mantle is FILLED with it. It is light weight and floats on top of heavier semi-liquid rock in the mantle. It works its way into areas to form oil, natural gas, coal, and other chemicals [some of them NASTY] that are regularly spewed by VOLCANOES. So in addition to fossils, a LOT of the carbon in the crust came from the MANTLE, ready for US to extract and burn.
Mt. Etna is one of the BIGGEST CO2 PRODUCERS in the WORLD, as well as a site in the South Pacific just North of New Zealand. NOT surprising, nearby "science monitoring" stations show CO2 levels going up, not just from the volcanoes, but from warmer water due to solubility rules.
CO2 LAGS TEMPERATURE OVER TIME. It does NOT CONTROL IT! It goes up as a CONSEQUENCE of higher temperatures.
REAL scientists know this. And, so do I. *I* will *NOT* accept THE LIES from CLIMATE ACTIVISTS!
bombastic bob (*) is a long-established example of those attention-seeking types who attempt to build their "character" and stand out via the use of an attention-grabbing typographical gimmick. In this case it's bob's use of ALL-CAPS to GRAB readers' **ATTENTION**.
If he didn't do that, we might not notice it was him, (**) and that would never do.
(*) I'm not sure whether the fact his name is uncapitalised is intentional or unintentional irony
(**) We might even risk inadvertently taking him seriously
bombastic bob: "CO2 LAGS TEMPERATURE OVER TIME. It does NOT CONTROL IT! It goes up as a CONSEQUENCE of higher temperatures."
If as you claim, atmospheric CO2 concentration increases as a consequence of temperature increase, what is causing the global temperature to rise?
"Carbon is the 4th most abundant element in our solar system."
You do, of course, know that Carbon is not the issue, but Carbon Dioxide, don't you?
"The mantle is FILLED with it. It is light weight and floats on top of heavier semi-liquid rock in the mantle. It works its way into areas to form oil, natural gas, coal, and other chemicals [some of them NASTY] that are regularly spewed by VOLCANOES. So in addition to fossils, a LOT of the carbon in the crust came from the MANTLE, ready for US to extract and burn."
Oh FFS! You think oil and coal is created by natural processes in the mantle and wells up to the surface in a never ending cycle? Really? I thought that had been debunked decades ago and everyone knew it. Clearly you didn't get the memo.
It's the current world, not much different from the past ... the story only makes me think of an old quote that I've always respected ...
"When I came back to Dublin I was court-martialed in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence." - Brendan Behan
In one of his 'Discworld' novels, Terry Pratchett mused on government pronouncements. To the oft stated Government response "there is no evidence" of whatever was at issue, his question was "have you looked?" It would seem that the Trump administration, having looked, does not like what it sees. If the observatory is forced to close and cease measuring CO2 levels and collate those with mean global temperatures, I expect that in the future, the Trump administration will reply 'there is no evidence' to questions linking greenhouse gas emissions to global warming. This is not 'shoot the messenger', but 'bury your head in the sand'.
As that other great satirist, Tom Lehrer sang (See icon):
"We will all burn together when we burn"
But what I really do not understand is why they are so intent on 'killing the goose that lays the golden eggs'. I am currently reading 'The Ideological Brain' by Leor Zmigrod, which has interesting science about ideological people. I'm only half way, so I'm hoping there is advice on how to deal with them.
It may well be, once Europe has got itself organized military not to need the USA, that it begins to treat
it more like the existential threat it is now slowly becoming.
Life and death natural resources, like non-flooded farmland, and non-parched crops are very much worth going to war over.
Take a look at Africa or the middle east for examples of that, but imagine it played with modern weapons.
I hope it wont be neccessary, but to defend our way of life against a country hell bent on buggering
up the planet in short order is something we could, and eventually would, have to do if push came to shove.
Careful of the unexpected consequences of what you wish for.
By the way, like evolution, the science of global warming is pretty much agreed here apart from a few religious crackpots,
it's the cost and best method of remediation that is the big discussion.
Well, it was actually written to parody the worlds response to climate change, so you are probably more correct than you realise.
How 'Don't Look Up' Powerfully Exposed the Absurdity of Climate Inaction
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin promised that "The Trump Administration will not sacrifice national prosperity, energy security, and the freedom of our people for an agenda that throttles our industries, our mobility, and our consumer choice while benefiting adversaries overseas." (emphasis added)
I'm not following everything fanatically, but to my recollection, the climate crisis will cause worse storms of all kinds [1] plus ocean rise and therefore lots (and LOTS) of flooding and wind damage, and conversely areas of severe drought (including "heat dome" effects) that raises wildfire risks (also "helped" by wind). I think that all these will "throttle" American -- if not global -- industries, mobility, and choices much more dramatically than trying to mitigate the problem even a little! [2]
1. American perspective: windstorms, summer thunderstorms including tornadoes (rain, wind, lightning), tropical storms (cyclones -- again rain, wind, lightning plus storm surge, and also spawning tornadoes), and winter snow/ice storms (often with wind and "polar vortex" cold that breaks things).
2. As in "too little, too late" but can we please continue to try things instead of going "head in the sand"? Because that doesn't work out when the predator sneaks up and kills the foolish bird.
You left out flooding caused by thunderstorms or torrential rains, lightning storms, drought, dust storms, wildfires, and probably one or two that I can't remember right off hand.
1. I live in Texas and we see all of those plus the ones I added above.
The bad part of all of this is that while they may be sporadic in nature the one thing that is certain is that they will occur again and yet in Texas we don't plan for handling them because it costs money and money is clearly more important than lives. One obvious example is the recent devastating and deadly floods in a part of Texas known as "flood alley". Yeah who could of guessed that floods there are fairly common. And yet a couple of years back an effort to greatly improve the warning systems was turned down due to costs. Another example is the great freeze of 2021. A similar but much less deadly freeze occurred in 2011 after which the republican Texas Legislature rushed in with "guidelines" to prevent it from happening again. Since the "guidelines" were completely voluntary none of the major parties responsible for electric generation and distribution implemented them due to, according to them, costs. And the result was 246 deaths in 2012. Apparently the "party of life" won't let a little death get in the way of more money.
2. "too little, too late" the mantra of conservative cost/benefit analysis. Devastating weather related incidents are clearly on the rise WORLD WIDE and I think there may be a common factor. Something like say climate change to blame. But hey what do thousands of climate scientists know?
Also noteworthy were the murderous fools lobbying the local government to refuse or redirect federal aid to improve precautionary emergency measures (like sirens) because, and I quote, "the devil is in the Whitehouse".
As to the "too little, too late".... no. That's never going to be the case, because even e.g. reducing sea-level rise by a millimeter is better than NOT reducing it. This is the denier's favorite claim: asserting that we can't prevent climate change, so don't bother trying to reduce it.
Look, there's a substantial challenge out there that'll take real courage, effort, and ingenuity to tackle (here Global Warming) and what does Trump do? Claim it doesn't exist, hide the evidence under a bunch of carpets, blame previous administrations, state it's a witch hunt, defund those that study this challenge, stop funding public media that report on it, and so forth ...
He'd say "I have very big hands, much bigger than Marco Rubio, biggest hands in the World" (implying he was referring to his penis or balls), but when it comes to dealing effectively with challenging issues ... pffft, vacuum, empty nonsense, a stubborn scaredy-cat hide-and-seek ostrich orange.
It's like an hallucinating LLM that boasts it'll right solve all World conflicts in 3 days flat and get a Nobel Peace Prize for it, but 6 months later the conflicts have in fact worsened ... not to mention the unreleased Epstein files, the boasts that DOGE brownshirt wankers were very very brilliant (yet achieved absolutely nothing, again), etc.
Just mention Greta Thunberg and see him go hide under his resolute desk! Dude's all hot air with no real vision nor capability to develop successful multi-step plans to address the biggest challenges faced by the US and the World, in concert with allies, and managing to convince adversaries to go along as well. Zero leadership ability, none, nada, zilch.
Water vapour is the most abundant and consequential 'greenhouse' gas.
This is how the woo sector of society is gaining the upper hand: post ill-informed twaddle & pseudo-science takes everywhere and then just sit back and watch it spread like herpes.
This is how the woo sector of society is gaining the upper hand: post ill-informed twaddle & pseudo-science takes everywhere and then just sit back and watch it spread like herpes.
Indeed. The woo sector threatens to beat people with their Hockey Stick and wooden thermometers, if they dare to question the consensus. 50-60,000 wooists will be jetting off to Brazil in November for the UN COP super spreader event where they'll be demanding their $100bn a year. In the run up to that event, there'll be a flurry of papers to remind everyone that we're doomed, doomed I tell you if we don't act now and give money.
But the woo sector might be losing the upper hand, and hopefully the money they've been extorting as their models predictions get falsified. A large part of that is because water vapor is the most consequential 'greenhouse' gas. The IPCC states this, and scientists know this. Problem is the effects are mostly negative, ie clouds, and those are a wicked problem to solve in models. I find it strange that people here are generally sceptical of AI, yet place blind faith in 'AI' that only attempts to model complex and chaotic weather systems on a planetary and very long scale.
...and the "methane" link in TFA shows methane emissions going down over time (while CO₂ skyrockets) .
However the problem is that all the dead life and plant matter that as been deposited and decomposed at the bottom of lakes and the continental shelves of the oceans contains a lot of trapped methane.
Rising temperatures will eventually cause it to no longer be trapped casing a more rapid temperature increase that in turn releases more methane - a vicious cycle until it is all gone but by then the planet (and us!) will be toast
See icon.
As I've observed before, there is a place for such articles, and it is good that they are published and thought about and commented on, but a tech publication isn't the place. If Just Stop Oil's website is suddenly running opinion pieces on the relative merits of vi and Emacs, then I stand corrected.
Actually, I disagree. Just Stop Oil, much like Trump, can't be taken at face value for this kinda stuff. Tech publications, solid ones anyway, cater to people of a technical and scientific bend and don't mind getting a bit down and dirty with numbers and science at times.
That's not to say they are perfect. A certain unnamed peer website of El Reg's (with a Latin-inspired name) is OK on its science, but its commentards are in full-on hive mind mode. As an example, one commentard there calling the Republicans Talibans. Not a peep of disagreement, more like +86/-0 votes. It's such an echo chamber that even though I like the message I can't stand the medium.
(Maybe we could ship some of our more, ah, diverse, commentards like Beast666 there, to inject different, and very insightful, viewpoints).
On the other hand, when you go to regular news site, most of them shy well away from any over-complicated explanations likely to disturb people on their couch.
In any case, these articles seems popular enough, so while you are entitled to your opinion, you also seem to be in the minority. I even learned something about Mauna Loa, courtesy of Jellied Eel. Who would also make a very welcome addition to counter the hive minds elsewhere.
A few years ago they wanted to build a telescope there. People protested. Supposedy Mauna Kea is 'sacred land'. So they went elsewhere.
If you can't build a telescope then maybe the climate observatory needs to go as well.
Either that, or the whole 'sacred lands' argument is bunk.
Errrmmm... Mauna Kea was indeed the focus of protests by the local community. (It has a heck of a lot more telescopes on it, and the proposal for an admittedly monster-sized 30-meter telescope was too much for the indigenous people to swallow. That, and it got latched onto by various non-indigenous people of a non-science-oriented mentality. The astronomy that has been done from Mauna Kea over the past few decades has been absolutely amazing... but I digress.)
Mauna Loa (different volcano on the same island) has a few telescopes on it, mostly smaller ones. As far as I know, it hasn't gotten nearly the same level of reaction. Not yet, anyway.
Can cry "drill baby drill" all they want but the writing is already on the wall. Solar and wind power is already significantly cheaper than coal, so he will NEVER bring back that dead and polluting industry. AI datacenters might temporary keep some old coal plants online but they'll close when the bubble pops.
Electric is also already cheaper than gas for cars per mile, while there are other issues involved that will make the transition take a while EVs overtaking ICE is already fait accompli, nothing Trump can do will stop that either.
Even if the US banned solar and EVs it wouldn't stop the rest of the world from making that transition, it would only put the US way behind the rest of the world economically and technologically.
Electric is also already cheaper than gas for cars per mile, while there are other issues involved that will make the transition take a while EVs overtaking ICE is already fait accompli, nothing Trump can do will stop that either.
Depends how much your electricity costs, how much EVs are subsidised and when governments get around to adding fuel and VED to EVs. UK government has just had to create another bribe to try and persuade people to buy EVs
Meanwhile, Florida demonstrates why it's superior to California with a car that's lighter than both ICE and EVs-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYLqGgTbT_E
Fuel efficiency might need some work, but Jay Leno owns a similar vehicle that could be run off tequila or moonshine. This one also has an afterburner as a way to improve road safety by discouraging tailgaters.
Of course ICE vehicles are never sold with some kind of financial incentive. And just think how cheap ICE fuel would be if the govt. taxes were removed. Burn, baby, burn.
Yet somehow we have to try to live together, making hopefully sensible decisions based on the information and knowledge we have, so that the next generation, and the ones after that, can all enjoy and pass on a life worth living.
For some reason we're not actually very good at doing that, despite some good efforts and intentions.
There's not that much tax on gasoline in the US, and fossil fuels have massive subsidies. Drilling rights on public land is sold for a song, companies aren't forced to post bonds to clean up the sites so it is easy for the subsidiaries doing the drilling to go "bankrupt" when the wells run dry and just leave everything out there for someone else (i.e. the EPA via the taxpayers) to clean up.
Not to mention all the military spending over the years to keep the flow of oil going, and stupid foreign policy decisions like being close to the Saudi government when they are some of the most awful rulers in the whole Middle East, just because of all the oil they have. If the Saudis had no oil we'd be treating them like we treated Saddam and Gaddafi - sanctions and we definitely would have invaded and/or bombed them after 9/11 since that's where most of the terrorists came from - and where much of Al Qaeda's funding came from.
Jellied Eel lives in the UK. Like one or two of the other British commenters with an obsessive fandom of the American right and the imported US-centric culture war, it's not even clear- despite this- whether they've ever actually visited the US at all, let alone Florida *or* California.
Take their comments with that pinch^w cellarful of salt.
@DS999
"Even if the US banned solar and EVs it wouldn't stop the rest of the world from making that transition, it would only put the US way behind the rest of the world economically and technologically."
I never quite understood this 'idea' that the US would ban solar/wind/EV's, why? I havnt seen any reason why anyone would go out of their way to do so, and if they work for a particular job then why not? I can understand removing the subsidies from these things as we are regularly told how mature the technology is and that it works, so why not?
There does however seem to be a perception that cutting subsidies for those technologies is banning them, which would suggest those technologies are not so mature and that they do not necessarily work for what they are being applied for.
Trump has already made moves to make approvals for wind turbines more difficult. Not sure he has any way to put roadblocks up for solar, but I imagine his Project 2025 pinheads are digging through federal statutes hoping to find a way.
They are going beyond just taking away the subsidies for EVs. They're rolling back fuel efficiency regulations for ICE, presumably hoping the automakers will build less efficient (i.e. cheaper) engines thereby making ICE cars less expensive and harder for EVs to beat. There's also been talk about taxing the electricity used for them, in the name of "fairness" since the gas tax is used to fund highway construction and EVs which don't pay that are therefore "freeloading".
They're going to pull out all the stops to tilt the playing field in favor of fossil fuels. The oil companies donated a LOT of money to Trump and republicans, and they want to get their money's worth for those bribes.
@DS999
"Trump has already made moves to make approvals for wind turbines more difficult."
How so?
"They are going beyond just taking away the subsidies for EVs. They're rolling back fuel efficiency regulations for ICE"
Good. The increase in heavy handed regulations on ICE was to make EV's look competitive and viable. You say above about making approvals for wind more difficult, ICE cars have these regulations for the same reasons. It is good to remove them.
"thereby making ICE cars less expensive and harder for EVs to beat"
And so EV's need to hobble their competition through increased regulation to be competitive.
"There's also been talk about taxing the electricity used for them, in the name of "fairness" since the gas tax is used to fund highway construction and EVs which don't pay that are therefore "freeloading"."
Government will use any reason to tax more generally. However highways are needed for cars to ride on and if it is to come from vehicles then it is unfair to tax one and not the other. Also EV's being heavier cause more wear.
"They're going to pull out all the stops to tilt the playing field in favor of fossil fuels"
Or correct for the massive tilt that was made to favour EV's.
Dear codejunky, I own an EV, bought it used, although it's pretty new. Compared to an ICE it is a much nicer drive. If I had to choose between them the EV is an easy win over an ICE, although I fully appreciate that not everyone would share that choice.
Bottom line, EVs are really what 'cars' should have been a very long time ago, and almost were back in the beginning, but we didn't have the tech, and all the money went the way of hydrocarbons. Now there are massive vested interests who want/need to sweat every last cent they can out of their hydrocarbon investments. If that costs the planet a few million lives and a crashed ecosystem or two, that's no biggy to the 1% for whom 'money' is all that matters.
If it really stuffs the planet, or at least human civilisation, I'm sure the 1%, along with the rest of us who went along for the ride, will take absolutely no responsibility whatsoever—I mean, we'll all pretty soon be dead anyway, so who cares about the future?
@Adair
"Bottom line, EVs are really what 'cars' should have been a very long time ago, and almost were back in the beginning, but we didn't have the tech"
That would be why we didnt have them before. You may feel that way about the car and yet as you already acknowledged before "not everyone would share that choice". What is great for you is your preference.
"If that costs the planet a few million lives and a crashed ecosystem or two, that's no biggy to the 1% for whom 'money' is all that matters."
Hyperbolic bollox so we can ignore that for now.
So as per the discussion you joined- the playing field was tilted massively for EV's with subsidies and increased regulations against ICE vehicles. While for you it is preference, DS999 recognises the need for such a tilt against ICE to 'convert' people. Merely expecting EV's to compete without rigging the market seems a very scary thought for those pushing EV's. Justified by claiming the end of the world.
I take it that in your view there is 'nothing going on' that we human beings need take any responsibility for. In fact we can burn hydrocarbons as fast as we like and there will be no adverse consequences on a global level.
And if the Greenland ice mantle is melting, and sea levels are rising, and weather patterns becoming more extreme, it is absolutely incontroverble that human activity has nothing to do with it.
If that's your view I'm sure you have rock solid, substantive, peer reviewed evidence to back it up, because a lot of livelihoods, and lives, depend on you being right.
Or, do you just not cope very well with change? Many people don't.
And if the Greenland ice mantle is melting, and sea levels are rising, and weather patterns becoming more extreme, it is absolutely incontroverble that human activity has nothing to do with it.
Yep. Or more correctly, very little to do with it. Once upon a time, there was an Ice Age. Then, there wasn't. The ice started to melt, and has continued to melt. Weather patterns aren't becoming "more extreme", it's just extremists making those claims with very little evidence.
If that's your view I'm sure you have rock solid, substantive, peer reviewed evidence to back it up, because a lot of livelihoods, and lives, depend on you being right.
Rock solid evidence you say? Well, here's one that was prepared earlier-
https://www.scubadiving.com/exploring-bahamas-crystal-caves-in-abaco
Crystal Palace has floor to ceiling crystal columns and big draperies. Areas of the cave can drop down to 150 feet for short periods of time then come back up to 80 feet and even as shallow as 40 feet in some areas. I enjoy the 70-degree water and on most of the dives we had very little decompression and on the shallower ones no decompression.
How can this be, if sea levels are now higher than they've ever been? Those formations don't form underwater, so their presence shows that when they did, sea levels had to have been much lower than today. But anyone with some basic knowledge of geology would know this.
Seeing as I answered my last test question myself.. Some of those structures have been dated. Can you find where those results are?
I'm just interested to know why you are so determined to think that human activity in respect of CO2 emissions cannot possibly be having any significant impact, notwithstanding 'natural' inputs - which generally takes place over far longer timescales - we are a part of 'nature', so just as likely to effect our environment as anything else. And we certainly do, the evidence of our long term impacts are everywhere.
So why are you so determined to deny any responsibility in this case?
@Adair
"Or, do you just not cope very well with change? Many people don't."
That is a very hyperbolic comment that manages to entirely miss the discussion you joined. I dont participate in your religion so its kinda difficult to argue in the religion context. As far as evidence goes you would have to be a climate change denier to think the climate doesnt naturally change, as we have historical records throughout human history and approximations of before that. Add that none of the religious models can predict a damn thing nor that if we believed them we wouldnt be doing stupid things with monuments to sky gods.
But if you wish to back to the discussion in the real world feel free
@Adair
"Where does religion - mine or anyone else's - come into this?"
I thought that was clear when I pointed out your whole comment was hyperbole.
"My question remains"
That is entertaining because you joined a discussion about something else and now demand answers to your religious questions. EV's vs ICE competitive or not?
"why are you so determined that human input of CO2 into the atmosphere cannot possibly be having any impact on global climate?"
At what point did I say that? What I said was I didnt want to get into a discussion about your religion.
That is entertaining because you joined a discussion about something else and now demand answers to your religious questions. EV's vs ICE competitive or not?
EVs are going to get even more expensive in the UK, thanks to this brilliant bit of Beebonomics-
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly8ynegwn4o
The government has increased the maximum price it will pay to companies for the electricity generated by new wind farms.
It comes as ministers are trying to meet challenging pledges to bring down household bills and create an electricity grid that it is almost entirely free of fossil fuels by 2030.
Sooo.. they're going to bring down household (and business) bills by making electricity more expensive (subsdies not included). And the ever useless Bbc doesn't seem to grasp that the government won't be paying, it will be the consumers.
@Jellied Eel
"Sooo.. they're going to bring down household (and business) bills by making electricity more expensive (subsdies not included)."
If the BBC dared recover from its green madness I imagine a lot of the UK would quickly realise how hard they are being robbed for the rich. We havnt had a decent energy policy for over 20 years and somehow milibrain is back in charge or ruining our lives. I hope people notice before the lights go out but I think we may have passed that point already.
@Adair
"And still the question remains unanswered"
You dont seem able to understand the answer in my last comment so I will try one last time- You claim I said that, I did not say that.
Hopefully you can now understand? And again you joined a discussion about one thing and DEMAND answers to your own little religious question.
Back to the discussion you joined: "EV's vs ICE competitive or not?"
I am waiting for your honest answer.
Still no explanation of where 'religion' comes into this discussion—I've never raised it, but clearly something on your mind.
And regarding your non-answers to a simple question, I think we can all see what value we should place in your opinion on the matter, which seems to be nothing more than repeated trolling, or an invitation to join you down a conspiracy rabbit hole.
In reality, actions have consequences. Sometimes those consequences seriously impact human wellbeing and even survival (not to mention the wellbeing and survival of other living things). We human beings do, in fact, have a massive, and increasing, impact on the 'quality of life' that this planet provides. We can either take our responsibility seriously, and do our best to mitigate the damage we cause, or even to avoid the damage in the first place, or we can take the irresponsible pathway—"Nothing to see here", "It's all someone else's fault", "Let other people sort it out", "I reserve the right to do what the hell I like, and to hell with the consequences", "It's just nature, innit", and all the other justifications we like to come up with for living self-absorbed, irresponsible lives.
@Adair
"Still no explanation of where 'religion' comes into this discussion—I've never raised it, but clearly something on your mind."
And yet you still bang on your religion in every comment. No matter how I point out you proclaiming your religious beliefs and then claiming I said something I didnt say. Almost as though you are fanatical about your religion.
"And regarding your non-answers"
You joined this discussion about the competitiveness of EV's and started banging on about your religious beliefs and demanding I defend something YOU SAID not me.
If you wish to have your religious discussion feel free to go find people who wish to discuss it. But dont join someone elses conversation then cry when I dont want to change the subject completely to your religious beliefs.
'And yet you still bang on your religion in every comment. No matter how I point out you proclaiming your religious beliefs and then claiming I said something I didnt say. Almost as though you are fanatical about your religion.'
Now you're just being weird. Some examples supporting your assertion might be helpful ...
@Adair
"Now you're just being weird. Some examples supporting your assertion might be helpful ..."
Ok. Quoting you: "And still the question remains unanswered: why are you so determined that human input of CO2 into the atmosphere cannot possibly be having any impact on global climate?". This is YOUR assertion. I didnt say this YOU did. So can you provide the example of where I said that?
I cannot speak for the voice in your head. The straw man you are arguing with is not me. You are not even joining in the conversation that YOU joined. That is very weird.
a. can you explain how you manage to conflate that question with 'religion'?b. it's a straightforward question, why so resistant to providing a straightforward answer?
Allow me to provide an answer.
Global Warming has pretty much all the characterstics of a cult, or religion, complete with zealous believers and heretics (or 'deniers') like me. It copied Catholocism with the sale of indulgences, only this time they're called 'Carbon Credits'. Buy enough of those and you can sin all you want. It comes complete with hellfire and damnation, and we'll all burn, if we don't repent and be less sinful. And then of course there are the high priests, who decide the doctrine of the faith, and excommunicate (ie fire, deplatform) any heretics who dare to challenge the sacred scriptures of the IPCC.
And like a lot of cults or religions, it can be very difficult to deprogram true believers and convince them that they've been mislead. And deliberately so. Those indulgences are worth billions, so keep the faith, don't ask questions and just pay up. The UN EP wants their $100bn a year, which will make them wealthier than pretty much every church or cult.
> Global Warming has pretty much all the characterstics of a cult [which] copied Catholocism with the sale of indulgences, only this time they're called 'Carbon Credits'. Buy enough of those and you can sin all you want.
That analogy would be as clever and witty as you want to think it is if it actually reflected the reality of the situation rather than another strawman setup.
That reality being that a large proportion of those who are concerned about global warming *do* view carbon credits just as sceptically as yourself and consider them an excuse to carry on "business as usual" at a low cost, involving alleged solutions of dubious merit.
And that the entities who actually buy and sell those carbon credits tend not, on the whole, to be individual people in the first place- those supposedly prone to that alleged pseudo-religious fervour- but are usually large, faceless, soulless corporations which generally behave in a purely functional profit-driven, self-interested and amoral manner.
(Yes, we all know that their PR teams do their best to pretend otherwise when it suits them, but that doesn't make it so).
Carbon credits aren't a secular "indulgence" for individual guilt, they're a means- so their proponents would argue- to push the market in a more desirable direction using its own self-interest as motivation. Whether they're actually well-designed to that end, or just an example of regulatory capture, is open to question.
Regardless, and back to my original point- to paraphrase Voltaire, a witty analogy proves nothing.
That analogy would be as clever and witty as you want to think it is if it actually reflected the reality of the situation rather than another strawman setup.
You rather make my point about the difficulty of breaking true believers free of their cult programming. It is the reality. Al Gore created his Inconvenient Truth, and then-
In 2004, Gore co-launched Generation Investment Management, a company for which he serves as chair. A few years later, Gore would also found the Alliance for Climate Protection, an organization which eventually founded the We Campaign. Gore would also become a partner in the venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, heading that firm's climate change solutions group. He also helped to organize the Live Earth benefit concerts. In 2010, he attended WE Day (Vancouver, Canada), a WE Charity event. He favors replacing the income tax with a carbon tax: "We should tax what we burn, not what we earn. This is the single most important policy change we can make."
Prophet and profit. Can't think why someone who owns a VC fund would want to replace taxes on income and wealth with easily off-set carbon indulgences. Can't think why he'd own beachfront poperty whe he's convinced the seas will rise and drown it.
... but are usually large, faceless, soulless corporations which generally behave in a purely functional profit-driven, self-interested and amoral manner.
You expected anything different after those individuals and corporations discovered they could make a lot of money creating imaginary threats and taxing thin air? Who do you think bankrolls outfits like the Grantham Institute that churn out lots of doomsday predictions and scare stories?
Carbon credits aren't a secular "indulgence" for individual guilt
Sure they are. John Kerry got to jet around the world as Biden's climate ambassador. Easily done when married into the Heinz family fortune and can just buy some off-sets. Or there's all the Hollywood climate experts. They get paid to lie to camera and read from scripts. School drop-outs can do a few lines for an interview, look suitably concerned and then jet off to their next superyacht charter. Just buy enough carbon credits or pay for a few trees to be planted, and all their sins are forgiven. And with a good accountant, that can be expensed.
> "You expected anything different after those individuals and corporations discovered they could make a lot of money"
Pretty sure I already made clear that *I* didn't expect anything other than for large, faceless, amoral-by-design corporations to behave in a purely self-serving, profit-seeking manner.
If the system was badly designed- and I'm not one of your strawman environmentalists who was/is blindly in favour of it in the first place- then *of course* they're going to exploit it for their own profit.
> "Can't think why someone who owns a VC fund would want to replace taxes on income and wealth with easily off-set carbon indulgences."
So, which of two contradictory cases are you trying to make? The original one, that credits are a secular "indulgence" to salve the conscience of individuals like guilt-stricken moralist Al Gore- even though the vast majority are traded by amoral corporations?
Or the complete opposite, that they were designed in bad faith as a tax-avoidance scam by the amoral, self-serving likes of, er.... Al Gore?
You still haven't addressed my point that many of the (individual) environmentalists you'd like to paint as hypocrites buying credits as indulgences are- in reality- either sceptical or downright critical of that system in the first place.
So, which of two contradictory cases are you trying to make? The original one, that credits are a secular "indulgence" to salve the conscience of individuals like guilt-stricken moralist Al Gore- even though the vast majority are traded by amoral corporations?
They're not contradictory. Al Gore created a VC fund to make money out of the fear he'd created from his disaster movie and based on his past performance, I doubt he has much of a conscience. Activists lobby governments to create regulatory frameworks that favor their products and make billions out of subsidies created via regulatory capture. Gas turbines generate cheaper and more reliable electricity than windmills, but CCGT & OCGT operators are loaded with carbon penalties to artificially increase their costs, windmills get billions in subsidies and can't generate reliable electricity. And then there's Drax. Converted from burning coal to burning forests, generates close to £1bn a year in subsidies and just happened to have an exec sitting on the UK Climate Change Committe to keep those subsidies pouring in.
You still haven't addressed my point that many of the (individual) environmentalists you'd like to paint as hypocrites buying credits as indulgences are- in reality- either sceptical or downright critical of that system in the first place.
Some obviously are hypocrites, ie Hollywood celebs who do some PR expressing concern for the environment but have massive carbon footprints living their luxury lifestyles. They can afford to be blissfully unconcerned about inflation & energy poverty. Their staff can sort their rubbish into recycling bins so they're doing their part while luxuriating on superyachts. Some environments used to protest outside Drax while it was still burning coal, but do nothing to prevent Drax burning forests. Or there's this lot-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Stop_Oil#Funding
In April 2022, it was reported that Just Stop Oil's primary source of funding was donations from the US-based Climate Emergency Fund
And dear'ol Dale Vince who went from living in a caravan to buying a castle & football club, all thanks to the subsidies we're forced to pay for his windmills. Why aren't JSO supergluing themselves to windmills to protest about the very obvious destruction of the environment that they cause? If they managed to superglue themselves to the blades, that would be entertaining and generate publicity.
But billions have been pumped into promoting Global Warming, which then leads to trillions in chasing Net Zero, which transfers that money from businesses and individuals into the pockets of subsidy farmers. And again even if Net Zero is achieved, it will have no measurable difference on temperatures. All the science around Global Warming show this will make no difference, yet pointing this out gets people branded as 'deniers' because those subsidies must flow.
Re 'religion': try looking in the mirror.
And, you still haven't answered the question: why are you so determined that human sourced CO2 emissions cannot be responsible for climate change?
But, in fact, your persistent deflection and unwillingness to give a straightforward and honest answer tells us all we need to know.
We all have our beliefs and convictions, but sooner or later they have to face Reality, and Reality always wins. So let's hope we do our best to choose wisely, and be willing to adapt when reality makes it's truth felt. My opinion on 'global warming' may indeed be wrong; so may yours. Probably neither of us are completely correct.
Something is happening. It behoves us to do our best to learn what and why. Then may we have the wisdom to respond appropriately.
'Bye. :-)
@Adair
"a. can you explain how you manage to conflate that question with 'religion'?"
I didnt. You ranted your religious beliefs and I told you I didnt want to discuss your religion. You joined a discussion and are trying to turn it into your sermon. No thanks.
"b. it's a straightforward question, why so resistant to providing a straightforward answer?"
I did answer it. You are the one claiming I said something I didnt say. That is the answer. The fact that you repeat yourself as though you cant move on until you get a specific answer to your stupid question suggests either you are a bot, telemarketer or just a believer without understanding.
How about you join the conversation you are replying to? Ev's economical or not?
And still the question remains unanswered: why are you so determined that human input of CO2 into the atmosphere cannot possibly be having any impact on global climate?We're all waiting for an honest answer.
I've given you honest answers. The problem is you don't understand the anwswers so instead use straw. So we have Net Zero-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net-zero_emissions#History_and_scientific_justification
The idea of net zero came out of research in the late 2000s into how the atmosphere, oceans and carbon cycle were reacting to CO2 emissions. This research found that global warming will only stop if CO2 emissions are reduced to net zero.
Which is the basic reality denial. It drifts further into fantasy land-
If CO2 emissions from human activities are reduced to net zero, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere would decline. This would be at a rate just fast enough to compensate for the slow warming of the deep ocean. The result would be approximately constant global average surface temperatures over decades or centuries.
So an attempt at geoengineering. This is going to cost trillions in just the UK, have huge economic and social impacts and will achieve.. Net Zero. It will have no measurable impact on UK or global temperatures. If it's achieved on a global scale and we do somehow manage to reduce atmospheric CO2, we then lose the benefits from the 'Greening of the Earth'. But then wealth redistribution is really the point of Global Warming-
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years since the Industrial Revolution.” Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN’s Framework on Climate Change
And as to your strawman, if you believe in the physics of CO2, then human emissions will have an effect, it's just that because the IPCC and 97% of the world's scientists know that CO2 is a weak GHG, the effect is minimal. So 1.2-1.5C per doubling CO2 from all sources, the vast majority of which are natural responses to warming.
Then the reality deniers ignore history and deny climate change-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age#Recent_glacial_and_interglacial_phases
The current geological period, the Quaternary, which began about 2.6 million years ago and extends into the present, is marked by warm and cold episodes, cold phases called glacials (Quaternary ice age) lasting about 100,000 years, and warm phases called interglacials lasting 10,000–15,000 years. The last cold episode of the Last Glacial Period ended about 10,000 years ago. Earth is currently in an interglacial period of the Quaternary, called the Holocene.
And there's still some debate around where we're at in that process. We can be confident we're not in the cold bit because places like Canada and N.Europe aren't under many meters of ice. But glaciers are still retreating, sea levels have risen around 140m and are still rising. So if you believe in Ice Ages, then you'd expect everything we're seeing, but is being falsely attributed to human activity. Or in a more scientific sense, we really don't know how much warming is a result of those processes, and how much might be human activity.
Climate 'scientists' of course assume all of it, and ignore the null hypothesis that 'Global Warming' is actually natural, so the process of the Earth oscillatiing around a mean with those natural warm/cold glacials.. And we don't really know why those happen, except for all the evidence that they do. We don't really know what temperatures or climate to expect when we hit peak interglacial. We know more about glacials, and other natural climate changes like the MWP, which was warmer, or as warm as today. We know about the LIA because that was widely documented and we know that cold period ended at around the same time as the Industrial Revolution began.
Of course the climate 'scientists' try to deny the MWP and LIA because those are rather inconvenient for CO2 dogma. The LIA ended, it warmed. I am Jack's lack of suprise. And again, the trillion dollar question is how much warming is as a result of the LIA ending, and how much might be a result of human activity. But we know that CO2 levels rise naturally as a result of warming.
Which is why actual climate science is FUN!. We don't really know why events like the MWP and LIA happen. Our planetary history is littered with climate events like the MWP & LIA, and we know humanity generally thrived during the warm periods, and struggled during the cold. We know (or strongly suspect) that CO2 can't have been responsible. The Sun might not, nor Milankovitch Cycles. The Sun because assumptions around a constant output and because effect seems to exceed cause. But we know the LIA coincided with a Grand Solar Minimum but the Maunder Minimum occured after the LIA began.. So that might have contributed to the LIA, but didn't cause it.
And for additional FUN! we might be heading into the Eddy Minimum, so will be able to observe any climate effects. Based on past planetary performance, it's a bit soon to be heading into another LIA. Plus there's potential effects from our declining magnetic field and what that might mean for cloud condensation nuclei, if Svensmark's theory about cloud formation is correct.. But currently climate 'scientists' want you to ignore all those Inconvenient Truths and fixate on CO2 instead, because CO2 dogma is so, so profitable.
Yawn.
Talk to the 'bot.
1. Claim: Net Zero is “fantasy land” and costly with no measurable impact
Scientific consensus: The physics of greenhouse gases is well understood: CO₂ traps heat by absorbing infrared radiation, leading to warming. Even a “weak” greenhouse gas effect per doubling (~3°C equilibrium climate sensitivity including feedbacks) has profound consequences for sea level, weather extremes, and ecosystems.
Cost vs. benefit: The economic costs of climate change (e.g., extreme weather damage, loss of agricultural productivity, health impacts) already run into hundreds of billions annually. Studies (e.g., Stern Review) show mitigation is far cheaper than the cost of unmitigated warming.
Impact of Net Zero: While the UK alone cannot stop warming, coordinated global action is required, just like any other collective problem (e.g., ozone depletion). The claim that reducing CO₂ has no measurable impact ignores cumulative emissions: temperature rise is proportional to total emissions, so every tonne of CO₂ avoided reduces warming.
2. Claim: Reducing CO₂ removes “Greening of the Earth” benefits
Short-term vs. long-term effects: Elevated CO₂ can stimulate plant growth, but this effect diminishes due to nutrient limitations, water stress, and heat extremes. Many “greening” benefits are offset by reduced crop yields under heatwaves and shifting rainfall patterns caused by climate change.
Biodiversity risk: Excessive warming leads to habitat loss, ocean acidification, and desertification—negating any short-term benefits of CO₂ fertilization.
3. Claim: Climate action is about wealth redistribution (citing Christiana Figueres)
Context: The quote is about shifting from a fossil-fuel-based industrial model to a sustainable one, not a secret wealth redistribution scheme. Redesigning economies to be low-carbon is about avoiding catastrophic economic harm, not political ideology.
Fallacy: Even if some policy advocates see social equity as an additional goal, it does not invalidate the underlying science of climate change.
4. Claim: CO₂ has only a small effect (~1.2–1.5°C per doubling)
Feedbacks: The 1.2°C per doubling is the no-feedback value. Real-world climate includes positive feedbacks (water vapor, albedo changes, clouds), raising equilibrium climate sensitivity to ~2.5–4°C per doubling (IPCC AR6).
Observed warming matches models: The ~1.2°C warming since pre-industrial times tracks well with anthropogenic greenhouse forcing, as confirmed by attribution studies.
5. Claim: Current warming is natural (Ice Age cycles, MWP, LIA)
Orbital cycles: Milankovitch cycles operate over tens of thousands of years. Current warming is happening over decades—100x faster than glacial transitions.
Attribution studies: Numerous peer-reviewed studies (e.g., Hegerl 2019, IPCC AR6) show >100% of post-1950 warming is anthropogenic. Natural factors (solar, volcanic, orbital) alone would have caused cooling, not warming, over this period.
MWP & LIA: These were regionally variable, not globally synchronous events. Modern warming is global, unprecedented in rate, and exceeds the peak of the MWP globally.
6. Claim: Climate scientists “deny” natural variability or null hypothesis
False premise: Climate science incorporates natural variability extensively (ENSO, PDO, AMO, solar cycles). Attribution studies explicitly compare natural vs. anthropogenic forcings.
Null hypothesis tested: The IPCC and thousands of papers have rigorously tested whether current warming could be explained by natural factors alone—it cannot.
7. Claim: Solar minimums, magnetic fields, Svensmark’s cosmic ray theory explain warming
Solar influence: Satellite observations since 1978 show no significant upward trend in solar output; if anything, a slight decline. Yet temperatures rise.
Cosmic ray hypothesis: Empirical evidence does not support a significant role for cosmic rays in recent warming (Kirkby et al. 2016, CERN CLOUD experiment).
The argument relies on outdated or misrepresented science, confuses natural cycles with rapid anthropogenic warming, and misattributes policy goals as conspiracies. The overwhelming body of peer-reviewed evidence supports that:
Yawn.Talk to the 'bot.
Quite so. This one has been busy picking cherries..
Even a “weak” greenhouse gas effect per doubling (~3°C equilibrium climate sensitivity including feedbacks) has profound consequences for sea level, weather extremes, and ecosystems.
Big fat cherry there.. Where do you get the 3C ECS figure from? A model using RCP8.5 perhaps, and doesn't consider negative feedbacks? And there is no evidence that sea level increases are happening, over and above anything expected during an interglacial. And weather is just weather, with the only 'extremes' coming from alarmists. The sky is falling, well, according to models, it will be falling, and yet it can't be observed.
Cost vs. benefit: The economic costs of climate change (e.g., extreme weather damage, loss of agricultural productivity, health impacts) already run into hundreds of billions annually. Studies (e.g., Stern Review) show mitigation is far cheaper than the cost of unmitigated warming.
Stern isn't a climate scientist. His report has widely been discredited by other economists. It also shows a reversal of reality given agricultural productivity has increased due to CO2 fertilisation. and a handy summary of extremists claims vs reality here-
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2025-7-23-new-record-set-for-deaths-from-climate-and-weather-disasters
Therefore you might be surprised by the actual record that has been set: The first half of 2025 (January to June) has seen the fewest number of deaths from climate and weather disasters of any first half year this century.
The claim that reducing CO₂ has no measurable impact ignores cumulative emissions: temperature rise is proportional to total emissions, so every tonne of CO₂ avoided reduces warming.
And I'm sure you can cite that relationship. So we reduce a tonne of CO2. What exactly is the corresponding reduction in temperature? I've cited it before, so we can be reasonably confident that achieving Net Zero achieves a temperature reduction that can't be measured, but at a collosal cost.
Short-term vs. long-term effects: Elevated CO₂ can stimulate plant growth, but this effect diminishes due to nutrient limitations, water stress, and heat extremes. Many “greening” benefits are offset by reduced crop yields under heatwaves and shifting rainfall patterns caused by climate change.
There's no 'can' about it. It does stimulate plant growth. Have you never seen a greenhouse? Plants evolved when CO2 levels were far higher and elevated CO2 can reduce water stress. There are no 'heat extremes' either, if CO2 dogma is true and only around 1.5C/doubling. See also-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_carbon_fixation#Genetic_engineering_C4_rice_project
The team claims C4 rice could produce up to 50% more grain—and be able to do it with less water and nutrients
Biodiversity risk: Excessive warming leads to habitat loss, ocean acidification, and desertification—negating any short-term benefits of CO₂ fertilization.
First, quantify that risk. Then quantify what you mean by 'excessive warming'. 1.5C is not excessive, and if you read the IPCC WG2 & 3 reports, beneficial due to extra water vapour and rainfall. Which means desertification is less likely, especially as geoengineering and irrigation projects are already pushing back deserts. And of course you had to pick the ocean acidification cherry. So oceans have an average pH of around 8.2 and gigatonnes of carbonates to get through before oceans could acidify. Even if increased rainfall helps remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
Fallacy: Even if some policy advocates see social equity as an additional goal, it does not invalidate the underlying science of climate change.
No, it is fact not fallacy. Climate 'science' has become advocacy, not science. We're being forced to waste billions on Net Zero because of that activism. And then of course there's the upcoming UN EP jolly in Brazil where 60,000 or so activists will jet in to demand even more money, and the UN will demand their $100bn a year.. And reality has an annoying habit of invalidating the underlying 'science' of climate change.
Feedbacks: The 1.2°C per doubling is the no-feedback value. Real-world climate includes positive feedbacks (water vapor, albedo changes, clouds), raising equilibrium climate sensitivity to ~2.5–4°C per doubling
RCP8.5 strikes again, along with fantasy assumptions. Real-world climate also includes negative feedbacks, ie clouds create albedo changes that result in less energy reaching the surface and more being reflected.. But I guess you always sunbathe when it's cloudy because it's warmer in your model.
Observed warming matches models: The ~1.2°C warming since pre-industrial times tracks well with anthropogenic greenhouse forcing, as confirmed by attribution studies.
It also invalidates many models that predicted >1.2C warming, and confirms low ECS.. Especially given pre-industrial times coincide with the end of the LIA.
MWP & LIA: These were regionally variable, not globally synchronous events. Modern warming is global, unprecedented in rate, and exceeds the peak of the MWP globally.
Except we don't really know this because we didn't have PRTs, especially PRTs installed at airports and sun traps. Some climate activists and pseudo-scientists have desperately tried to deny the MWP and LIA trying to use trees and mud as thermometers.. Which isn't really very accurate, hence why we use PRTs to measure temperatures, and not bristlecone pines. So then the pseudo-scientists switched to a different form of denial and the claim that the MWP and LIA were somehow 'regionally variable'. Yet can't provide any plausible explanation how so many regions could warm or cool for decades or centuries.. Or why this novel situation couldn't be happening again.
Null hypothesis tested: The IPCC and thousands of papers have rigorously tested whether current warming could be explained by natural factors alone—it cannot.
Nope. Thousands of papers have been spewed out, many have not been rigoursly tested because events like Climategate showed how pal-review had replaced peer-review. Which meant we got garbage like MBH and the infamous Hockey Stick that then got throroughly discredited.. Trust the trees, and the models, not observations. Well, we can't always trust the observations either when many Met Office or NWS weather stations are badly sited or maintained, and per WMO guidelines, should not be used for climatology. But according to the Met Office, measuring jet exhausts is proof of Global Warming.
Solar influence: Satellite observations since 1978 show no significant upward trend in solar output; if anything, a slight decline. Yet temperatures rise.
Or they show variations in spectral composition, ie UV levels rising and falling even though TSI might remain relatively constant. But like I've said several times, it's interesting because it's one of those effect exceeding cause issues. Or we don't really understand, even though we know that UV has big effects on atmospheric chemistry. Plus it's one of those 'since records began' challenges given very limited data compared to climate or geological history, especially solar spectral composition.. Or SEP output.
Cosmic ray hypothesis: Empirical evidence does not support a significant role for cosmic rays in recent warming (Kirkby et al. 2016, CERN CLOUD experiment).The argument relies on outdated or misrepresented science, confuses natural cycles with rapid anthropogenic warming, and misattributes policy goals as conspiracies.
And you finish on a huge cherry that misrepresents science. So CLOUD-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_experiment
Atmospheric aerosols and their effect on clouds are recognised by the IPCC as the main source of uncertainty in present radiative forcing and climate models, since an increase in cloud cover reduces global warming...
On 24 August 2011, preliminary research published in the journal Nature showed there was a connection between Cosmic Rays and aerosol nucleation. Kirkby went on to say in the definitive CERN press Release "Ion-enhancement is particularly pronounced in the cool temperatures of the mid-troposphere and above, where CLOUD has found that sulphuric acid and water vapour can nucleate without the need for additional vapours.
So actually confirmed in part Svensmark's hypothesis. At least you neglected to add the usual denialist's argument that there are no trends in GCRs or SEPs because there are, and that data is available at the various cosmic ray observatorys scattered around the world.
But ignore all those natural, cyclical contributions that actually drive the climate because the UN really really wants their $100bn a year, and Ed Millibrain really wants to spend billions fighting the War on Warmth. People used to make jokes about governments taxing thin air if they could. Now they are, well, the small CO2 component anyway.
DS999 recognises the need for such a tilt against ICE to 'convert' people
How in the heck did you get that from my post? The field has been heavily tilted in favor of fossil fuels for decades. The subsidies for EVs balanced things, and even if made permanent would still cost a fraction of what Bush's folly in Iraq cost which was basically a fossil fuel subsidy - because we couldn't attack the real culprit Saudi Arabia he decided to make up evidence that Saddam was to blame and attacked him instead.
@DS999
"How in the heck did you get that from my post?"
My apologies, I credited you with understanding that.
"The field has been heavily tilted in favor of fossil fuels for decades."
Yes. Because they worked and therefore people used them. Oddly not having much competition beyond previous technology (horse) does lead to people using the thing that works. We can agree.
"The subsidies for EVs balanced things"
No. Subsidy to develop it and get it off the ground makes sense but once mature and working can stand on its own two feet. Just like ICE vehicles. Regulating the competition out of existence (regulations against ICE) is tilting the scale. If EV's were being increasingly regulated to remove them by whatever date that would be tilting against them. That is what happened with ICE vehicles, regulatory phase out. Removing those balances the market again and if EV's are a competitive option (aka work and people want them) then they dont need the subsidy.
"Bush's folly in Iraq"
You wont get me defending the middle east conflicts.
"The field has been heavily tilted in favor of fossil fuels for decades. The subsidies for EVs balanced things,"
Balance horrible subsidies for mega companies to continue raking in gold bars by installing comparable subsidies for using a different form of energy? Madness. Off with both of their heads. There should be no subsidies and tax credits for the oil giants (who buy politicians by the case lot) and none for EV's anymore either.
Government has only a few of ways to guide things. One is to ban something, tax it/tax it into oblivion or subsidize it. The US would be much better off if it didn't have to maintain cordial relationships with despotic regimes due to needing their oil. It goes even further than that since oil is a global commodity, disruptions to any major producer ripples out and affects pricing whether one buys from that producer or not. If usage could be reduced to the point where the US could extract all of the oil it can use in it's own refineries without needing imports, that would a much better situation. The issue now is the reluctance of US vehicle producers to manufacture reasonably priced EV's and a ban on imports. I'd be very happy to see VW chuck their ID.4 production in the US and build reduced-feature ID.2/3's instead. They'd corner the market as they have production capability in the US and could avoid the tariffs.
"and all the money went the way of hydrocarbons."
It was more like there wasn't the infrastructure to support electric vehicles like there is today. Many homes didn't have electric service and high power tubes were expensive, in limited supply and inefficient. As petrol could be stored in a bog standard can, it was easy to move around/store. The tipping point was the electric starter that eliminated the need to hand crank an engine which had an injury/mortality rate attached to it.
Oil is such a marvelous base material that it needs to be preserved for more valuable uses than dually pickups used by 50kg ladies to go to line dancing class on Wednesday nights or do a school run. We are seeing that it's not an infinite resource.
"Government will use any reason to tax more generally. However highways are needed for cars to ride on and if it is to come from vehicles then it is unfair to tax one and not the other. Also EV's being heavier cause more wear."
Most US states have an EV tax to compensate for the fuel taxes they don't pay. Those that don't will catch up soon. An EV is heavier than a comparable segment car, but not as heavy as a "full size" SUV or pickup, nor a delivery truck. Far less than an articulated lorry, which should go without saying and those are more wearing on roads.
Subsidies were fine initially to help kick start the adoption of EV's, but should have never been extended in the US after the original sunset date/metric. Keeping them on has skewed the market as government fiddling will do.
There's a big political price for the US to pay for all of the oil it has to import. California is lining up for a big dose of fun when they have to start importing finished fuels in 2026 after a couple of refineries have been regulated out of business and will shut down by the end of 2025. Ramping up a less oil-intensive means for personal transportation and electrifying trains is going to be required. A reduction in air pollution will be a bonus, but that's not something people see as much as financial impacts. I'm all for favoring EV's for those who's needs match up with having them. Over time, there will be more charging infrastructure installed so living in an apartment/condo won't mean no way to charge an EV at home.
This post has been deleted by its author
"Trump has already made moves to make approvals for wind turbines more difficult. "
Whomever the President is, they wind up getting blamed for many things they have nothing to do with. The whole of Congress and the Presidential office can be very keen on renewable energy and when you get down to where the solar panel is mounted to a rooftop or a pylon is installed to mount a wind turbine, the red tape is at maximum snarl. Where I live, half the cost of installing solar panels on one's roof is the cost of permissions and permits. That includes the cost of hiring somebody to create the required paperwork to turn in for the permits.
There is Presidential interference when the companies want to install projects off-shore or lease government land at $1/100ac/99yrs. One President says "drill, baby, drill" and the next has a zero impact policy where nothing can be built. There's often not much in between.
EV's are gaining in popularity. People need to hear from friends and neighbors that have one to feel confident that the FUD they've been fed is rubbish. That's a slow process. EV's ARE more expensive to build and have been loaded down with so many "features" that add cost that it's hard to find inexpensive models for basic transportation. Even more so in the US with an effective banning by tariff of imported models. If you want a giant Hummer EV, no problem. If you want something in the $20,000 region (without subsidies), problem. BTW, EV owners pay more than what ICE drivers of moderately efficient cars do in added taxes that are paid annually for their registration. Are you that worried that government won't be taxing EV owners wherever they can? Who's side are you on?
Whether or not one agrees with the argument, the idea is that EV subsidies balance things like cheap oil licenses (justified because "we all need oil for fuel") and atmospheric pollution from refineries, gas stations, vehicles and transporting volatile liquids around the place.
@Malcolm Weir
"Whether or not one agrees with the argument, the idea is that EV subsidies balance things like cheap oil licenses"
That doesnt make much sense. Oil licenses for something we need and not just for petrol/diesel including generating electricity vs subsidy to try and convince people to buy an expensive EV not the juice it runs on.
The amusing argument was that Trump want to ban EV's. Which seems to be said for Trump not being willing to keep propping up a technology that isnt competitive. If it is competitive it doesnt need subsidy, if it needs subsidy then its not competitive.
"atmospheric pollution from refineries, gas stations, vehicles and transporting volatile liquids around the place."
it isnt a good idea to go into pollution when discussing ICE vs EV as EV doesnt come out very good and in both cases its the trade off for actual civilisation.
"... If it is competitive it doesnt need subsidy, if it needs subsidy then its not competitive."
Interesting.
In that case, why is the petroleum industry subsidies OK and EV subsidies are because EV's are non-competitive?
@alisonken1
"In that case, why is the petroleum industry subsidies OK and EV subsidies are because EV's are non-competitive?"
Who says the subsidies are ok? I am from the UK, we dont give subsidy to petroleum and tax the balls off users. In petrol/diesel terms we have fuel duty and VAT.
Electric is also already cheaper than gas for cars per mile, while there are other issues involved that will make the transition take a while EVs overtaking ICE is already fait accompli, nothing Trump can do will stop that either.
This kind of simplistic reductivism isn't going to help. In many countries, electricity for charging cars is already more expensive than using petrol and charges are only likely to increase because of the massive costs associated with building out networks of charging points for every car, all year round.
Renewables are becoming more popular for baseload across America because of the lower unit costs, though rising capital costs may make them less attractive. But coal is probably never coming back.
And that's where most EVs mostly charge.
They have roofs, and we charge partly off ours.
It is a lot cheaper than building an oil well, a refinery, pipelines, and a fleet of tankers by sea and road to provide a network for refilling cars with dangerous flammable fluids.
One day, every town will have a petrol station.
And a while later,
not every town will have a petrol station.
Have you seen a new petrol station recently?
"And a while later,
not every town will have a petrol station.
Have you seen a new petrol station recently?"
I've seen several new petrol stations (in the US) recently. I've also planned long trips where I needed to be careful about towns not having a petrol station. Even if a small town had one, it might close at sunset (ish) so timing was a component. EV charging is pretty much hands-off from the station perspective, so they can be open 24/7/365 even if the store is shut. I know of a few routes where there is a petrol station but it's often 2x the price as they can get away with charging a premium for being the only one around for miles.
The goal for me is to have an EV by the end of the year and the roof redone so I can install solar panels. I work in the field every other day or so which means I have plenty of time to charge an EV on mostly solar. I'm trying to find the bits to put together a storage option with a local vendor that has used 24v 5.2kWh batteries at a very nice price. It might work out to be better to not jump through the hoops to have a grid-tied system and instead get some DC mini-splits and storage to plug in an EV. I'd run fridges, freezers and the freeze dryer on solar which can be a large chunk of my usage in a month.
It is difficult to make cost comparisons when the end user is subject to the global energy market forces. When I buy electricity from my supplier the cost is tied to other energy sources. I can't buy just solar, or just wind, or just geothermal electricity at the cheap rate they can be produced. The cost gets bundled with gas, coal and nuclear produced electricity. And then I have to pay a hefty tax on top of that. The only way a consumer can truly break free of the energy monopoly is to effectively go off-grid (as far as possible) with their own energy sources.
"The only way a consumer can truly break free of the energy monopoly is to effectively go off-grid (as far as possible) with their own energy sources."
Going completely off-grid is likely far too much cost and/or a big shift in lifestyle. People get used to having leccy 24/7 and don't think about doing the washing at 10pm rather than making sure they're doing it in the middle of a sunny day when they have solar needing using up. Covering the last 10-20% of needs can cost more than the first 80-90% so being grid connected is still value for money. Of course, if everybody does that, there will be a big grid demand on cloudy days and the reduction in earnings for the power companies might not allow them to make investments in the network so they can service that demand during those periods. There's solutions for that and I think the rise in my base fees I just received a notice for might be due to so much solar going on houses in my area. It may not be long before rates vary throughout the day due to supply/demand forces and consumer devices are able to turn on/off, up/down based on current prices. EV charging could be a large balancing factor. Not by having EV feed the grid, but by their charging when supply reduces prices and they can take up surplus generation and not charge during high demand periods unless the owner really needs the electrons and is willing to pay for them. Eventually, EV's will be able to back-feed power, but there's a lot of kit needed that's hasn't been evolved yet. Large fleets will be able to better do that initially when cars are checked back in at the end of the work day by employees and have charge remaining for the evening demand spike and can be recharged later when demand falls.
I saw my first EV with livery of the State highway department. A VW ID.4. I have yet to see an electric company EV. I'd think they'd be all over them for their non-truck fleet since they could charge them at cost ($0.03/kWh?). If pickup truck makers came out with an electric single/extra-cab variant for commercial use (rugged interiors, basic features), that could be a big seller. Aging Wheels (YT) did a comparison between a F-150 V8 and a Chevy Silverado electric. Towing sucks, but weight isn't a big factor. Many work trucks aren't towing trailers but need to haul tools and material in the bed. Electric truck can tow very easily, but chew through battery with aerodynamic drag being a big factor. Fine for local use, but not good for routine long distance. Nobody I've seen yet is offering a cab/chassis model where a custom workbody can be attached. The HGV market in Europe seems to be getting all of the cool new electric toys. Electric Trucker (YT) came across a semi trailer with a battery slug underneath to supplement a long haul electric truck. Yes, it takes away from maximum weight limits, but many loads "cube out" first. The volume is a factor rather than the weight. This is why Frito-Lay can use Tesla trucks in the US. Filling the trailer with packets of crisps doesn't add up to a lot of weight.
transforming stinky industries and giving them back their responsibility, repairable and reusable products instead of buy cheap and throw away, restoring some nice forest, cheap power, coast lines with less plastic and interesting chemicals, less dead and respiration diseases, better working public transport so a car is less often needed and resulting less traffic deaths, cities with some trees spending shadow, less microplastics - well, what if we do this all for a liberal hoax?
Yes they could (and they do). But then the historical trail is lost. And that's delightful to deniers because deriving trends across anything less than decades (deniers would prefer centuries) is extremely vulnerable to challenge, which delivers (flakey) ammunition to the deniers trying to maintain the status quo ante.
The biggest mystery to me is the effort that people put into justifying pollution....
Yes they could (and they do). But then the historical trail is lost. And that's delightful to deniers because deriving trends across anything less than decades (deniers would prefer centuries) is extremely vulnerable to challenge, which delivers (flakey) ammunition to the deniers trying to maintain the status quo ante.
Yes, well, climate is defined by 30yr intervals of average weather, so you can't blame sceptics for that. Although you can blame us for pointing out that a decade or so's 'Global Warming' is probably just weather.
As for challenges, or just enriching lawyers.. Breaking news!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce379k4v3pwo
The court ruled that developing nations have a right to seek damages for the impacts of climate change such as destroyed buildings and infrastructure.
It added that where it is not possible to restore part of a country then its government may want to seek compensation.
This could be for a specific extreme weather event if it can be proved that climate change caused it, but the Judge said this would need to be determined on a case by case basis.
"This is a huge win for climate vulnerable states. It's a huge win for Vanuatu, which led this case and is going to change the face of climate advocacy," said barrister Stephanie Robinson at Doughty Street Chambers, who represented the Marshall Islands.
It is not clear how much an individual country could have to pay in damages if any claim was successful.
It's a huge win for barristers and other lawyers bringing cases. She's right about it changing the face of climate advocacy. Rather than making claims in the media, they're going to have to make claims in courts and to legal standards of proof. So someone in Vanuatu wants to sue because Global Warming broke their greenhouse. Now, all they'll need to do to make and win a case is show proof it was Global Warming, and not a passing swallow dropping a coconut. Then to make a claim against an individual country, they'll perhaps have to prove it was an African swallow. Then which nation in Africa that swallow belonged to.
And then of course there's the usual legal bills to make a defence and appeal any decisions. And if the plaintiff can't make their case and courts rule for the defence, then there'll be legal precedents set. This is going to be so much FUN! There'll almost certainly be venue shopping, so Vanuatu trying to sue the USA in Vanuatu but if you're a lawyer involved, a lot of these "low-lying Pacific islands on the frontlines of climate change" have been investing heavily in tourism so more holiday makers can jet in and enjoy the sun. Will make a change from just the annual jollies the UN EP puts on when they fly 60,000 activists to places like Brazil for their 'Give us $100bn a year!' pity parties.
(now I think I'll go look and see if I can find who bankrolled this action, because I rather doubt it was a bunch of students from places like Vanuatu..)
As general comment, correlation of two variables does not yet mean there's direct nor full causation.
In particularly with monotonically growing dataseries it's difficult to establish what ratio of variable T change is due to variable C change, and what is due to other factors.
I don't suspect that CO2 contributes to global warming, yet what is annoying in global warming popular science articles is that for whatever reason they always fail to cite what is the CO2's scientifically measured contribution ratio or function to global warming with error limits, and how that ratio has been measured and where: do the human-induced CO2 emissions contribute to global warming by 20%, 50% or 80%, is that ratio know by accuracy of e.g. +-0,4%, +-4% or +-40%, and how do we know these?
Such measurements must have been done if we know CO2 emissions to cause much of the global warming, but why does the source of such essential scientific measurements with so profound impact to policies and budgets seem like the best-kept secret in the world?
The article's Goldilocks explained this, didn't it? Most of the current CO2 level is natural. The increase beyond the - again, natural - yearly summer/winter variation is humans emitting CO2 at geological scale minus a volcano eruption here and there.
The sensitivity of the resulting greenhouse temperature to CO2 increase (and implicated H2O vapour increase) is sooo difficult to calculate, that it took Svante Arrhenius 40 pages in *1896* to arrive at about + 5 .. 6 Celsius per doubling. Just based on first principles, observations and paper & pencil based math. https://www.rsc.org/images/arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf
Modern models incorporate many more feedback loops to arrive at + 2 .. 3 C per doubling. No wishful thinking lets the 1st principles go away or even reverse the causal link.
Modern models incorporate many more feedback loops to arrive at + 2 .. 3 C per doubling.
Yep. They have to to keep the money rolling in. Configure models with positive feedback loops that can't be observed in reality, and yey! Thermageddon! But then there are also reanalysis projects that compare model outputs to reality, and allow the models to be refined. Then Thermageddon is avoided. Funny how that works. But then if a model can't predict the past (ie hindcast) when we have observations to compare the model with.. how would we expect them to accurately predict the future?
No wishful thinking lets the 1st principles go away or even reverse the causal link.
True. So Arrhenius published his paper giving 5-6C per doubling. Then promptly got into arguments with chappies like Angstrom and Einstein who pointed out Arrhenius was doing it wrong and prompting a downward revision.. Which also had a fun side-effect of Einstein et al coming up with the concepts of quanta and photons to explain radiative effects. But that also showed debates around climate science are nothing new. Except today, Angstrom and Einstein would probably be branded 'science deniers'.
Such measurements must have been done if we know CO2 emissions to cause much of the global warming, but why does the source of such essential scientific measurements with so profound impact to policies and budgets seem like the best-kept secret in the world?
Well.. kind of, but this is the multi-trillion dollar question that's best ignored to keep the gravy train rolling. I keep asking the 'experts' here to cite the paper that's still generally accepted as showing the relationship between CO2 and temperature, but to date, none have been able to. It is rather fundamental, but it's also just a tad inconvenient. I've given hints before, but clue trail starts here-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hansen#Climate_change_activism
Hansen was invited by Rafe Pomerance to testify before the United States Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources on June 23, 1988.[78][79] Hansen testified that "Global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming...It is already happening now"
Which also helps demonstrate why Wiki isn't a reliable source. Citations link to assorted secondary sources and interpretations of Hansen's testimony, but not the testimony itself.. Which can be found here-
https://www.sealevel.info/1988_Hansen_Senate_Testimony.html
Where Hansen shows off a model he/NASA GISS produced that gave some predictions based on some emission scenarios. More on that in a bit. But then cited his paper on the modelled predictions-
https://www.sealevel.info/hansen1988.pdf
Which in turn cited some of the assumptions used in that model-
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/atsc/32/1/1520-0469_1975_032_0003_teodtc_2_0_co_2.xml?tab_body=fulltext-display
which is.. <drumroll> another model. And Manabe & Wetherald in turn cite a number of other publications.. But also discusses a lot of very important assumptions and caveats. But the TL;DR version is climate sensitivity wrt CO2 is around 1.2-1.5C per doubling of CO2. Then some of the papers cited by Manabe drill deeper into what doubliing means, and the temperature response is likely logarithmic. So that means say, 1.5C warming with CO2 rising from 275ppmv to 550ppmv, then another 1.5C from 550-1100ppmv. And assuming logarithmic, the warming effect is front-loaded, which means we've seen pretty much all the warming we're going to see from the initial/current doubling and we won't really have to worry about the next because there isn't enough carbon to burn.
But this is why the IPCC regards CO2 as a weak GHG, but oh so profitable. But then the pseudoscience happens. So a standard trick is filling a container with CO2 and then looking at a candle flame. Flame goes dim because CO2 will absorb some of the IR. Literal Global Warming in a can! Except the trick relies on the CO2 concentration inside the container being several thousand (or entirely) ppmv CO2. And being in a sealed container, isn't in any way representative of the real world.
But the real science is we still don't really know the climate sensitivity wrt CO2 (ECS) because it's a massively complicated problem to solve, with a lot of moving parts. But Hansen et al made assumptions that exagerated positive forcings & feedbacks, and ignored negative. And made some massive assumptions with 'emission scenarios' that assume the amount of CO2 we'll put into the atmosphere. And because those assumptions were wrong, his model was quickly falsified because reality tends to do this.
But because Global Warming and CO2 dogma is so very lucrative, the same tricks are repeated. So climate modellers will churn out press releases predicting imminent Thermageddon unless we waste more billions. But drilling down into those releases generally shows they use an emission scenario caled RCP8.5-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_Concentration_Pathway#RCP_8.5
In RCP 8.5 emissions continue to rise throughout the 21st century.: Figure 2, p. 223 RCP8.5 is generally taken as the basis for worst-case climate change scenarios. Since the publication of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (2014) the likelihood of this RCP has been debated, due to overestimation of projected coal outputs. On the other hand, many uncertainties remain on carbon cycle feedbacks, which could lead to warmer temperatures than projected in representative concentration pathways.
So taking a worst-case and unrealistic emisisons scenario and plugging that into an unreliable model gives dramatic press releases.. But doesn't reflect reality because of those uncertainties, which also include the existence of negative feedbacks, which could lead to less warming. So a basic GIGO problem.
And then to make life even more interesting, there are potential forcings and feedbacks unrelated to CO2, like the effect of a variable Sun, variations in cloud cover and albedo due to cosmic and solar particles and much, much more.
But another TL;DR.. Actual temperature observations don't really show any correlation with Keeling's CO2 curve, which is yet another demonstration that CO2 is a weak GHG. And that's being generous and assumes those temperature observations are accurate and reliable, which in many cases they are not. So the Met Office measuing jet exhausts or a heat trap in someone's garden and claiming those measurements as proof of Global Warming, rather than the Met Office (and NOAA/NWS) not following WMO guidelines for locating weather stations.
The Mauna Loa has to be the worst site for observing carbon dioxide levels. Why? Because volcanoes are major carbon dioxide emitters.
Second, we've been observing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere since 1812. In the middle of the last century, new sensors were developed to observe carbon dioxide levels. They are cheap, easy to use and fabulously inaccurate. Data from the electronic sensors do not agree with chemical analysis. I would view any data from Muana Loa with a jaundiced eye.
By the way, here's an interesting study on carbon dioxide levels.. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0958305X0701800206
Go to any greenhouse CO2 delivery system and discover decades of evidence that during daylight, the plants in a greenhouse adsorb very substantial quantities of CO2. Indeed the entire green house industry is now fully wedded to the substantial increase in the productivity created by CO2 adsorption. In which case, the same applies to all plant life, everywhere, during daylight. Plants adsorb CO2 during the day. That in turn means that at all times, during the day when temperatures are at their peak, where there is available plant life on the surface, the quantum of CO2 available to retain heat is substantially reduced. Again, as the day time temperature reduces alongside the reduction in heating from sunlight, then the CO2 levels rise. So that opens the door to a simple fact, during the heat of the day there is a substantial reduction in CO2 levels, and thus a equally substantial reduction in the retention of the heat of the day by the action of the CO2 gas. That during the night, when CO2 is not being adsorbed by plant life, and the heat of the day is reduced, usually at least halved, then also the CO2 levels are at their highest. Let me bet my right arm, all recorded CO2 levels are night time levels; not daytime levels.
The problem is; the cause of global warming is not CO2. Yes CO2 is a marker for the use of fossil fuels to be burnt to generate energy . . . but it is not the source of the heat; heating the atmosphere..The source of the heat is the now ancient technology of the ubiquitous Heat Engine. Any form of system designed to create energy either heats air such as internal combustion engines, or aircraft engines, or gas turbine engines; or they heat water to provide steam to drive a turbine to drive an electricity generator, and that includes all forms of electricity generation involving the use of steam; nuclear being a great example as the nuclear system is less efficient than a well designed coal fired system due to the added need to cool the nuclear pile heat generating system. ALL heat engines produce more than 60% excess heat that has to be delivered out of the system back into the atmosphere.
Yes the climate is changing. Yes the cause is the increase of the excess heat from all forms of energy generation using now centuries old heat engine technology; Yet no one within the climate debate wants anyone to talk about these quite simple facts.
The truth is humanity is increasingly adding to the heat input to the planet from the use of heat engines; particularly to generate electricity. Again, CHINA has recently been building a great number of coal fired electricity generation power stations all across their nation. is that the underlying reason for the now very evident acceleration of the heating of the planet? Sticking to the theme of Net Zero by 2050 does not address the facts; that if we do nothing, it is increasingly clear, large areas of the planet surface will soon be uninhabitable. We have no option but to bring to a complete stop the use of any form of heat engine to generate energy; or we face the simple fact, we are making the planet uninhabitable.
1st off, NOAA has been one of the largest propagandists in the Climate hoax.
425 ppm is nowhere near the tipping point! In fact, there is no tipping point, this world had at one time 700-900 ppm of CO2 and life flourished all over the planet! In fact, that world could easily feed a growing human population as much if the land now covered in permafrost could be used for farming. (Oh wait, much of that and is in Russia, oh we just can't have that can we!)
I gave pulled weather station data for the US from Carnegie Mellon University for over 200 US cities going back over 130 years, I done the math, done the graphs and guess what? Average yearly temperature shows NO appreciable increase in temperature! Not in the far north of the country, not in the far south, NOWHERE!
And yes, I know, the same ol' same ol' excuses, "IT'S GLOBAL WARMING!" But then you'll state data from sensors in concrete jungles!
This while hoax isn't about the climate, it's about political power and GREED! Many people have gotten rich off this scam!
Am I the only person who thought this was rather obviously satirical and wondered why it was being downvoted? (Unless the people downvoting it are the same people it's taking the piss out of...)
But joking aside, those types *will* keep asking "where's the evidence" regardless even when they've already seen it, but ignored and/or forgotten it because it didn't suit their beliefs and benefits their case more not to acknowledge awareness of so that their opponents have to bring it up again.
Eh, we've had this schtick from you countless times before. Your trolling is getting formulaic these days, if it ever wasn't.
So are one-line ad homs from Anonym.. ous Cowturds. But there's a good reason why some of this stuff seems formulaic.
So people like Rik will come along with the standard Gish-Gallop. S-B, Mars, Venus, Global Warming or minor variations on that theme. This goes back a while, eg astroturfers like this one-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealClimate
RealClimate was launched on 10 December 2004 by nine climate scientists
Just in time for the launch of Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth! And remarkably for a simple website created by a bunch of computer experts, the domain was registered by this bunch of professional astroturfers-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenton_Communications
Founded by David Fenton, who also gave the world this-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_Media_Services
Environmental Media Services (EMS) is a Washington, D.C.–based nonprofit organization that is "dedicated to expanding media coverage of critical environmental and public health issues".[1] EMS was founded in 1994 by Arlie Schardt, a former journalist, former communications director for Al Gore's 2000 Presidential campaign, and former head of the Environmental Defense Fund during the 1970s.
As I think Goebbels once said, repeat a lie often enough and people start believing it. Then to.. complement RC, a cartoonist create the badly named 'Skeptikal Science', who didn't like being called the SS and prefer SkS. And like RC, they claimed to provide carefully curated 'facts', along with some (very) original research, like coming up with the "97% meme". But basically means that because most reality deniers get their 'facts' from sites like SkS, it's simple to recognise and rebutt them.
Every once in a while, someone will come up with a new argument claiming to be proof of Global Warming, but those are rare and it's usually stuff like throwing up the Keeling Curve independently of any temperature series and trying to claim there's correlation, when clearly there is not.
(most reality deniers also generally suck at logic. If Global Warming science is settled, why are we still wasting so much money on it? If we know all there is, or even enough about CO2 and Global Warming, then we can safely cut that funding and reallocate it to adaptation and mitigation. Which means engineering lead solutions, not listening to idiots that lie to the courts and abuse tree rings..)
Yeah, the MAGA electorate with its mental age of 13 [1] is not even as smart as a 5ᵗʰ grader that was held back several times. The mental-age-appropriate technique of covering their eyes and ears in the face of danger may be the only one that sufficiently reassures them, so they don't continuously blow their fuses, hysterically. Trump's Ring-of-Honor wrestling education policy will surely help sustain that state of childlike servitude for some years to come, cultivating an electorate that increasingly believes in fairy tales and pseudo-profound bullshit.
It's medieval obscurantism 101 and its systematic deployment must be counteracted at every step!
(Note: [1] the concept of mental-age was debunked after that early nonsense)
"Some of the links in this article are to pages on the EPA website that either describe current consensus science related to specific greenhouse gasses, or which detail currently existing EPA programs. Do not for a nanosecond be at all surprised if those links soon return 404 errors ...
So to prevent that, convenient links to archive.org were provided as well.
is the post not about the funding being withdrawn, and the effect on scientific research,
Nope. It's about an activist/alarmist trying to find another stick to beat Trump with. Global Warming is a tad politicised that way. However, this climate science website actually has some facts from a scientist who worked at the MLO, and includes something I didn't know-
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/07/23/forrest-mims-top-10-reasons-to-keep-mauna-loa-observatory-open/
1. MLO is the ultimate site to calibrate a wide range of instruments (including mine since 1993) that measure sunlight, ozone, water vapor, aerosols and various gases. Many organizations calibrate their instruments at MLO, including the Navy Research Lab, PREDE, Solar Light, MRI, NASA, PNNL, etc.
And seeing as closing it probably won't save that much money, perhaps a better reason to keep it open. Kind of a metrology vs meteorology argument. New sites could be selected, but calibration and traceability can get very very complicated. There are comments from other scientists who've worked there as well.
And if you really believe that is how the natural world works please stay away from strychnine (lethal dose to an 80 killo human is less than 0.1 grams - that's around 1.2 parts per million), nicotine (lethal dose less than 1 gram, or around ten parts per million) and a whole host of other poisons where the deadly dose is much lower than what you sweepingly consider to be 'practically zero'. And that's before we get to the real nastiness of compounds like ricin at a few tens of milligrams.
The ecosystem of the planet involves and requires a great many more living things to work in harmony than just talking primates, and is likely to be similarly or more sensitive to some perturbations.We know from measurements that you really don't have to change the CO2 levels very much at all to alter the acidity of the sea or the rate of growth of certain types of plant by immediately measurable factors.
And that's before we get to the real nastiness of compounds like ricin at a few tens of milligrams.
And I'm sure that you also know that homeopathy is real and you aren't just comparing apples to castor beans. You could of course just try the CO2 room heating experiment. Point you're overlooking, either deliberately or accidently is people & planets are rather different beasts.. Although there probably is an analogy in there somewhere. So for the planet, the poison isn't so much CO2, it's energy, or the imbalance between Ein and Eout. Which is a bit like poisons, so if you absorb more than you can metabolise or excrete, it's bad. But unlike our closed systems, the planet is wide open, so all CO2 can do is momentarily delay the escape of energy. Which is also why when reality deniers get all excited about new temperature records, they're doing it wrong. CO2 dogma states it 'traps' energy, re-radiates it back downwards and thus if you want to find the Global Warming, look for increases in minimum temperatures, ie night time when any CO2 effect should be greatest.
We know from measurements that you really don't have to change the CO2 levels very much at all to alter the acidity of the sea or the rate of growth of certain types of plant by immediately measurable factors.
Well, growth rates of most types of plants increase with extra CO2. Greenhouses and all that. Plus most plants evolved when CO2 levels were far higher than today. But.. actually you do have to change the CO2 levels enormously to alter the acidity of the oceans. Mainly because they're alkaline. This is another experiment you can try at home. Get a bowl of seawater, or just make some water alkaline, so a pH of 8.2 Then to improve the simulation and make it more representative, add a couple of sticks of chalk to it.
And blow..
And blow..
And keep going until all the chalk dissolves because you've finally managed to turn the water acidic. This may take some time. Even though your breath would be around 4% CO2, or 40,000ppmv. Also not sure you're a talking primate but might be referring to things like my old friends with their own AC, the coccolithophore. One of those cute lil critters where we can literally stand on the shoulders of giants (ish) at places like the White Cliffs of Dover. And ponder how so many died to make so many meters of chalk when those much higher CO2 levels from the past should have dissolved their remains, so so many years ago.
(which is just another of those fascinating bits of real science vs climate science. There's some controversy around critters like coccolithophores and CO2/temperature relationships. Some scientists have demonstrated they can thrive with elevated temperature and CO2. Others dispute this. Which is fun because coccolithophores also leave behind very persistent molecules called alkenones. Which are used in climate proxies. So if the relationship is wrong, then the actual climate reconstructions based on those alkenones should be inverted..)
"And if you really believe that is how the natural world works please stay away from strychnine"
And LSD which works in doses measured in nano grams.
There's a difference between bulk process and things that can act as a catalyst in small amounts. The human body is all about that sort of thing and why many functions aren't well characterized. The dream of an artificial womb remains a dream as the levers are so small, very transitory and many unknown that it may never come to fruition. Taking sheep to Mars would be so much easier if frozen fertilized ova could be grown in an artificial way as there's no way the sheep would survive 9 months in freefall. If there was a way to cryogenicly preserve eggs, maybe chickens could make the trip, but they'd have issues with feeding them.
The observatory measures the level of CO₂ in the atmosphere, not emissions. The distinction is important because other things also affect the level of CO₂ - notably destruction of carbon sinks (e.g. cutting down forests, but not just that either).
You are wrong about Galileo too. He did not have "evidence based certainty". It was pretty clear that the Ptolemaic model was not holding up any more, but the available evidence at the time (e.g. lack of observed stellar parallax) meant the evidence supported Tycho Brahe's model better than Galileo’s.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
