Day: March 7, 2024

Scientists Expose Major Problems With Climate Change Data

Temperature records used by climate scientists and governments to build models that then forecast dangerous manmade global warming repercussions have serious problems and even corruption in the data.

‘Climate activism has become the new religion of the 21st century—heretics are not welcome and not allowed to ask questions,’ said astrophysicist Willie Soon.

Temperature records used by climate scientists and governments to build models that then forecast dangerous manmade global warming repercussions have serious problems and even corruption in the data, multiple scientists who have published recent studies on the issue told The Epoch Times.

The Biden administration leans on its latest National Climate Assessment report as evidence that global warming is accelerating because of human activities. The document states that human emissions of “greenhouse gases” such as carbon dioxide are dangerously warming the Earth.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) holds the same view, and its leaders are pushing major global policy changes in response. The Epoch Times has the story.

But scientific experts from around the world in a variety of fields are pushing back. In peer-reviewed studies, they cite a wide range of flaws with the global temperature data used to reach the dire conclusions; they say it’s time to reexamine the whole narrative.

Problems with temperature data include a lack of geographically and historically representative data, contamination of the records by heat from urban areas, and corruption of the data introduced by a process known as “homogenization.”

The flaws are so significant that they make the temperature data—and the models based on it—essentially useless or worse, three independent scientists with the Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences (CERES) explained.

The experts said that when data corruption is considered, the alleged “climate crisis” supposedly caused by human activities disappears.

Instead, natural climate variability offers a much better explanation for what is being observed, they said.

Some experts told The Epoch Times that deliberate fraud appeared to be at work, while others suggested more innocent explanations.

But regardless of why the problems exist, the implications of the findings are hard to overstate.

With no climate crisis, the justification for trillions of dollars in government spending and costly changes in public policy to restrict carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions collapses, the scientists explained in a series of interviews about their research.

“For the last 35 years, the words of the IPCC have been taken to be gospel,” according to astrophysicist and CERES founder Willie Soon. Until recently, he was a researcher working with the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian.

“And indeed, climate activism has become the new religion of the 21st century—heretics are not welcome and not allowed to ask questions,” Mr. Soon told The Epoch Times.

“But good science demands that scientists are encouraged to question the IPCC’s dogma. The supposed purity of the global temperature record is one of the most sacred dogmas of the IPCC.”

The latest U.S. government National Climate Assessment report states: “Human activities are changing the climate.

“The evidence for warming across multiple aspects of the Earth system is incontrovertible, and the science is unequivocal that increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases are driving many observed trends and changes.”

In particular, according to the report, this is because of human activities such as burning fossil fuels for transportation, energy, and agriculture.

Looking at timescales highlights major problems with this narrative, Mr. Soon said.

“When people ask about global warming or climate change, it is essential to ask, ‘Since when?’ The data shows that it has warmed since the 1970s, but that this followed a period of cooling from the 1940s,” he said.

While it is “definitely warmer” now than in the 19th century, Mr. Soon said that temperature proxy data show the 19th century “was exceptionally cold.”

“It was the end of a period that’s known as the Little Ice Age,” he said.

Data taken from rural temperature stations, ocean measurements, weather balloons, satellite measurements, and temperature proxies such as tree rings, glaciers, and lake sediments, “show that the climate has always changed,” Mr. Soon said.

“They show that the current climate outside of cities is not unusual,” he said, adding that heat from urban areas is improperly affecting the data.

“If we exclude the urban temperature data that only represents 3 percent of the planet, then we get a very different picture of the climate.”

Homogenization

One issue that scientists say is corrupting the data stems from an obscure process known as “homogenization.”

According to climate scientists working with governments and the U.N., the algorithms used for homogenization are designed to correct, as much as possible, various biases that might exist in the raw temperature data.

These biases include, among others, the relocation of temperature monitoring stations, changes in technology used to gather the data, or changes in the environment surrounding a thermometer that might impact its readings.

For instance, if a temperature station was originally placed in an empty field but that field has since been paved over to become a parking lot, the record would appear to show much hotter temperatures. As such, it would make sense to try to correct the data collected.

Virtually nobody argues against the need for some homogenization to control for various factors that may contaminate temperature data.

But a closer examination of the process as it now occurs reveals major concerns, Ronan Connolly, an independent scientist at CERES, said.

“While the scientific community has become addicted to blindly using these computer programs to fix the data biases, until recently nobody has bothered to look under the hood to see if the programs work when applied to real temperature data,” he told The Epoch Times.

Since the early 2000s, various governmental and intergovernmental organizations creating global temperature records have relied on computer programs to automatically adjust the data.

Mr. Soon, Mr. Connolly, and a team of scientists around the world spent years looking at the programs to determine how they worked and whether they were reliable.

One of the scientists involved in the analysis, Peter O’Neill, has been tracking and downloading the data daily from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and its Global Historical Climatology Network since 2011.

He found that each day, NOAA applies different adjustments to the data.

“They use the same homogenization computer program and re-run it roughly every 24 hours,” Mr. Connolly said. “But each day, the homogenization adjustments that they calculate for each temperature record are different.”

This is “very bizarre,” he said.

“If the adjustments for a given weather station have any basis in reality, then we would expect the computer program to calculate the same adjustments every time. What we found is this is not what’s happening,” Mr. Connolly said.

These concerns are what first sparked the international investigation into the issue by Mr. Soon and his colleagues.

Because NOAA doesn’t maintain historical information on its weather stations, the CERES scientists reached out to European scientists who had been compiling the data for the stations that they oversee.

They found that just 17 percent of NOAA’s adjustments were consistently applied. And less than 20 percent of NOAA’s adjustments were clearly associated with a documented change to the station observations.

“When we looked under the hood, we found that there was a hamster running in a wheel instead of an engine,” Mr. Connolly said. “It seems that with these homogenization programs, it is a case where the cure is worse than the disease.”

A spokesman for NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information downplayed the significance, but said the agency was working to address the issues raised in the papers.

“NOAA uses the well-documented Pairwise Homogenization Algorithm every day on GHCNm (monthly)—version 4, and the results of specific adjustments to individual station series can differ from run to run,” the spokesman said, adding that the papers in question didn’t support the view that the concerns about the homogenization of the data made it useless or worse.

“NOAA is addressing the issues raised in both these papers in a future release of the GHCNm temperature dataset and its accompanying documentation.”

Read the full story here.

Europe is Struggling to Meet Green Hydrogen Goals, Send Money

WINNING: €22 Billion EU Government money spent to produce 20,000 tons of green hydrogen, at a price of €1.1 million per ton, or €1,100 / kg.

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

WINNING: €22 Billion EU Government money spent to produce 20,000 tons of green hydrogen, at a price of €1.1 million per ton, or €1,100 / kg.

What’s stopping Europe from reaching its clean hydrogen goals?

By Andrea Bolitho & Euronews
Published on 05/03/2024 – 17:00•Updated 06/03/2024 – 10:51 

Green hydrogen is predicted to be a leading renewable energy source in the future, but production in Europe must ramp up massively to hit targets.

While the EU has pinned green hydrogen as one of the fuels of the future and aims to generate 10 million tonnes while importing a further 10 million tonnes by the end of the decade, renewable hydrogen production in Europe was just 20,000 tonnes in 2022.

Furthermore, 96 per cent of hydrogen used across Europe in 2022 was made from natural gas, resulting in significant carbon emissions.

“We need a clear regulation and a clear permitting process, and we need access to the [energy] grid,” explained Carlos Fúnez Guerra, the Green Hydrogen Development Manager at Iberdrola.

…

Can Europe still reach its goal?

“The big question behind all of this is money and funds,” reminded Malvault.

The European Commission has implemented a clean hydrogen regulatory framework and is investing heavily, so far, it has provided €22 billion and counting.

…

But Malvault warned Euronews that more funding will still be needed to reach the EU’s targets.

…Read more: https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/03/05/whats-stopping-europe-from-reaching-its-clean-hydrogen-goals

What can I say? If only some of these affordable and economically viable climate goals could be achieved without spending so much taxpayer subsidy cash.

Correction (EW): h/t Scarecrow Repair – €1100 / kg, not €11,000 per kg. We’re saved!

France Enjoys Electricity Prices 41% Cheaper Than Germany Thanks to Nuclear Industry

The Biden Administration and the far Left of the Democratic Party are congenitally opposed to nuclear power, but on February 22nd the Washington Post noted that Canada, France and Sweden have taken a different path from the U.S. and Germany.

From The Daily Sceptic

BY RICHARD BURCIK

The Biden Administration and the far Left of the Democratic Party are congenitally opposed to nuclear power, but on February 22nd the Washington Post noted that Canada, France and Sweden have taken a different path from the U.S. and Germany. The very best comparison of these two options is to examine France versus Germany. According to Next Big Future, “France’s nuclear energy spending was 60% of what Germany spent on renewables. France gets about 400 terawatt-hours per year from nuclear, but Germany gets 226 terawatt-hours each year [from renewables]. And 45 Terawatt-hours of Germany’s renewable power comes from burning biomass which generates air pollution.”

Renewable energy advocates in the U.S. like to say America should be a lot more like Germany when it comes to generating more electricity from wind and solar. Their argument is that wind and solar are already less expensive than fossil fuels.

But if renewables are cheaper, why does Germany now have the second highest electricity price, at 52 cents per kilowatt hour? Only a penny less than Denmark. And amazingly, Germany has decommissioned all of its nuclear power stations due to political pressure from that nation’s Greens.

And, again according to Next Big Future: “Germany’s solar farms will have to be rebuilt every 15-25 years. The wind farms will need to be rebuilt every 20-25 years. Nuclear plants can last 40-80-plus years. This means that it guarantees that the solar and wind farms will have to be rebuilt in 15-25 years.”

And if Germany’s wind and solar farms are more reliable, why did Germany have to resume burning lignite (brown coal) last winter when the wind stopped blowing, the sun stopped shining and the Germans could no longer import enough natural gas from Russia after the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine? Brown coal is 20% water and it generates more CO2 than burning wood.

Plus Next Big Future added: 

France completed construction on 76% of its current 58 reactors at an inflation-adjusted cost of $330 billion (€290 billion). The complete buildout of the 58 reactors is less than €400 billion. Germany has spent about €500 billion over the last 20 years to get to 35% renewables. Seven percent of this is burning biomass. France gets almost double the TWh from nuclear than Germany gets from renewables (solar, wind, biomass, hydro). France has gotten about 400 TWh per year from nuclear while all of Germany’s renewables (solar, wind and biomass) amounts to about 220 TWh.

According to Energy Central, “France’s cost was $1 billion to build each terawatt hour per year of clean energy.”

Germany’s cost is $2.5 billion to build each terawatt hour per year of relatively clean energy. The 180 TWh per year of solar and wind is clean but the biomass is not. It generates air pollution. France’s electricity is 41% cheaper for its citizens’ than Germany. Germans now pay 30 euro cents per kwh. while the French pay 18 euro cents per kwh. This was an extra €24 billion per year. Twenty-two years of extra cost is another $500 billion. This is triple the cost of France and does not include the rebuilding expense of solar and wind over the 50-plus years during the expected life of the nuclear reactors.

From 2006 to 2017, Germany increased the cost of electricity for households by 50%. French electricity prices are just 59% of German electricity prices. France produces one tenth the carbon pollution from electricity compared to Germany.

Emmanuel Macron has announced a “renaissance” of the French nuclear industry with a vast programme to build as many as 14 new reactors, arguing that it would help end the country’s reliance on fossil fuels and make France carbon neutral by 2050.

“What our country needs… is the rebirth of France’s nuclear industry,” Macron said in a recent speech.

Atomic energy provides about 70% of French electricity; low-cost nuclear power has been a mainstay of the French economy since the 1970s.

Clearly, France has made far better choices! Its nuclear based approach was far cheaper to install, will last longer and provides electricity at one half the cost. And the Germans veered far off the best course of energy action.

Richard Burcik is the author of two short books, The DNA Lottery and Anatomy of a Lie.

Climate fortune tellers say global warming causes cold spells too

The climate hypnotists tell you every kind of weather is climate change

By Jo Nova

The climate hypnotists tell you every kind of weather is climate change

100 years from now university students will write exam essays on the mass psychosis that overcame climate scientists in the early part of the century.

Here, for example are experts telling us with a straight face that winter cold snaps are also a sign of man-made climate change.

True seers can see climate change everywhere:

Global warming may be behind an increase in the frequency and intensity of cold spells

Beatriz Monge-Sanz , The Conversion

One less obvious consequence of global warming is also getting growing attention from scientists: a potential increase in the intensity and frequency of winter cold snaps in the northern hemisphere.

Naturally, this “potential” increase was expected, even though they didn’t think to mention it.  Even if they told us our children won’t know what snow is.

Some of the mechanisms that lead to their occurrence are strengthened by global warming. Key climate mechanisms, like exchanges of energy and air masses between different altitude ranges in the atmosphere, are evolving in ways expected to cause an increase in both the intensity and duration of cold snaps.

They expected it right after it started happening.

Students of psychics will note the princelings of climate science cover their bases in the same ambiguous terms — the weather can be very social and outgoing, but at times shy, you know. And key mechanisms, which we won’t name, at altitudes that are different, may be evolving. See what I mean?

These exchanges of energy and air masses “link to the behaviour of a region in the high atmosphere called the stratosphere.” says Ms Beatriz Monge-Sanz, mysteriously, explaining nothing at all and everything all at once.

I defy anyone to unpack the “mechanisms”. Somehow extra CO2 causes Sudden Stratospheric Warming (SSW) at the poles, and they can’t quite explain how. But they know, post hoc, that SSW’s have increased in the last 40 years, so it must have been “climate change” because that increased too.  And if only their supercomputers were a bit more super, they might be able to actually predict these SSW events in advance and all. But they can’t, and they even admit that.

Monge-Sanz is a senior researcher in Physics at Oxford.

I’d like to ask her: What weather would show us that climate models are wrong?

The tally of failure continues:  the hot spot is still missing, the climate models can’t predict the climate on a local, regional, or continental scale, they don’t know  why global warming slowed for years, They can’t explain the pause, the cause or the long term historic climate movements either. Measurements of satellites, clouds, 3,000 ocean buoys, 6,000 boreholes, a thousand tide gauges, and 28 million weather balloons  can’t find the warming that the models predict. In the oceans, the warming isn’t statistically significant, sea-levels started rising too early, aren’t rising fast enough, aren’t accelerating, nor are warming anywhere near as much as they predicted. Antarctica was supposed to be warming faster than almost anywhere but they were totally wrong. The vast Southern Ocean is cooling not warming. And the only part of Antarctica that’s warming sits on top of a volcano chain they prefer not to tell you about.

No wonder expert climate modelers don’t want their own pensions bet on climate models.

Students of 20th Century Climate Dogma 101 will marvel at how long a stupid, skillless, hypothesis kept rolling years after it was proven wrong.

Image by Wilfried Pohnke from Pixabay

____________

*Apologies to palm readers, who are probably more useful than climate scientists, and undoubtedly more accurate.

California man is first in the US to be charged with smuggling greenhouse gases, prosecutors say

Some guy was smuggling prohibited refrigerants. DOJ will probably recommend SuperMax for life.

From Watts Up With That?

Some guy was smuggling prohibited refrigerants. DOJ will probably recommend SuperMax for life.

https://apnews.com/article/hydrofluorocarbons-greenhouse-gases-smuggling-arrest-california-32f695c1a7f27d1a81a5f3d0602bf05d

Hart was arraigned Monday afternoon and pleaded not guilty to 13 charges including conspiracy, sale of prohibited materials and illegal importation, the statement said.

It’s the first prosecution in the U.S. to include charges related to a 2020 law that prohibits the importation of hydrofluorocarbons, commonly used as refrigerants, without permission from the Environmental Protection Agency, according to prosecutors

.https://apnews.com/article/hydrofluorocarbons-greenhouse-gases-smuggling-arrest-california-32f695c1a7f27d1a81a5f3d0602bf05d

Oy.

U.S. Attorney Tara McGrath said in a statement. “We are using every means possible to protect our planet from the harm caused by toxic pollutants, including bringing criminal charges.”

https://apnews.com/article/hydrofluorocarbons-greenhouse-gases-smuggling-arrest-california-32f695c1a7f27d1a81a5f3d0602bf05d

Tesla’s Berlin Plant Remains Shut Down After Eco-Terrorism…Over Half A Billion Euros Damage

Yesterday’s eco-terrorism attack will cause Tesla to shut down its Berlin plant until the end of the week… 12,000 employees idle…damage could reach over half a billion euros!

From NoTricksZone

By P Gosselin

Yesterday’s eco-terrorism attack will cause Tesla to shut down its Berlin plant until the end of the week… 12,000 employees idle…damage could reach over half a billion euros!

Some political leaders vow swift, harsh justice

The latest news today report that Europe’s only Tesla plant, located in Grünheide near Berlin, still remains closed after yesterday’s massive eco-terrorism attack by the extreme leftwing “Vulkan Group”.

See yesterday’s post here.

The attack on a power transmission tower caused a power outage at the Tesla plant and resulted in the deployment of firefighters, police and even an explosives special unit in Grünheide.

There was also a blackout for thousands of residents in the region, according to media outlets.

Nius.de here reports the damage will run in the upper 9-digit range.

According to Nius.de here:

The fire broke out in a transformer near Gosen-Neu Zittau at around 4:50 a.m., one hour before the start of the shift. The nearby small town of Erkner and parts of Berlin were also without power yesterday, the police told Bild. And: Surrounding areas of Woltersdorf, Gosen-Neu Zittau, Freienbrink, Fangschleuse, Wilhelmshagen and Rahnsdorf were also affected by the power outage.”

The Tesla plant manager, André Thierig, said all 12,000 employees had to be sent home on Tuesday and are not expected to return to work this week.

Threat of explosives

Moreover, Germany’s online Bild reports that “the emergency crews had to withdraw when they discovered an activist tent that was emblazoned with the words ‘Explosive ordnance buried here!’”

The electricity pylon is on fire
Photo: Private

The Brandenburg Explosive Ordnance Disposal Service (KMBD) had to be deployed.

Reaction form politicians was swift and harsh: “This has nothing to do with protest. These are criminals,” said Brandenburg’s Interior Minister Michael Stübgen (CDU) on the RBB program Brandenburg aktuell on Tuesday evening. “They are criminals and we will hunt them down with all the means our constitutional state has at its disposal.”

Population is Not Being Told the True Cost of Net Zero, Warns Former World Bank Economist

Bankrupt, blackout Britain where the ever-expanding ranks of the poor get clobbered, open borders place intolerable burdens on public spending and services, the rich spivs get richer backing heavily-subsidised energy white elephants – and those of a certain age look back to the good old days of the 1970s.

From The Daily Sceptic

BY CHRIS MORRISON

Bankrupt, blackout Britain where the ever-expanding ranks of the poor get clobbered, open borders place intolerable burdens on public spending and services, the rich spivs get richer backing heavily-subsidised energy white elephants – and those of a certain age look back to the good old days of the 1970s. That isn’t quite how Professor Gordon Hughes spells it out in his excellent new report that crunches the energy transition numbers of the collectivist Net Zero project, but it might be considered a fair summation of reading between the lines. 

The insanity of Net Zero becomes clearer by the day. The idea that hydrocarbons – a natural resource whose use from medicines to reliable energy is ubiquitous in modern industrial society – can be removed within less than 30 years is ridiculous. In his report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Professor Hughes concerns himself with the transition from hydrocarbons to ‘green’ technologies such as wind and solar. Forget all the politically-inspired low-ball figures of transition, he is suggesting. Looking at you, Climate Change Committee. It is likely that the amount of new investment needed for the transition will be a minimum of 5% of gross domestic product for the next 20 years, and might exceed 7.5%. Gordon Hughes is a former World Bank economist, and is Professor of Economics at the University of Edinburgh.

There is no chance of borrowing such an “astronomical” amount, notes Hughes, and the only viable way to raise the cash for new capital expenditure would be a two decades-long reduction in private consumption of up to 10%. “Such a shock has never occurred in the last century outside war, and even then never for more than a decade,” he notes.

Recent polling in the U.S. has shown that the desire of a majority of citizens to pay for Net Zero barely stretches to more than the ‘chump’ change in their back pockets. “Commitment to the energy transition is a classic ‘luxury belief’ held most strongly by those who are sufficiently well-off not to worry about the costs… Indeed at least some of those who promote the transition most strongly are among those who expect to gain from the business opportunities.” On this latter point, Hughes was possibly recalling the recent activities of rising media star Dale Vince (£110 million in wind subsidies to date, and counting).

Politicians sometimes blather about the pioneering role taken by European countries in Net Zero. Hughes points out that leaders in China and India are not fools. “Posturing about targets that are patently not achievable and might be economically ruinous is unlikely to convince anyone, although most will be too polite to point this out,” he observed.

Writing a foreword, Lord Frost identified a make-believe world inhabited by Net Zero proponents where it is claimed costs will magically come down, new technologies will somehow be invented and promised green growth will pay for everything. “But they never give any evidence for believing this – and, where we can check what they say, for example in the real costs of wind power, we can see that these cost reductions are simply not happening,” he said.

On the immigration front, Hughes notes a 1% increase in the British population every year. He notes that 4% of GDP must be invested every year in new (not replacement) capital per head. Of course nothing like this is being spent and capital per head is falling rapidly. “Just maintaining the amounts of capital per head will eat up an amount of investment equivalent to that required for the energy transition,” he states.

Squeezing domestic consumption, in other words making the already squeezed poor even poorer by removing all their remaining luxuries in life (older cars, cheap foreign holidays, meat), is the only realistic way to fund the enormous sums required for the Net Zero energy transition. Possibly a glimmer of reality is creeping into political circles with the opposition Labour party having gone through “agonies” and ditched its £28 billion a year green deal. “Clearly, they concluded that it was impossible to sell an increase in the tax burden of that magnitude to a reluctant electorate,” he said. In fact, the sums involved in the Labour plan were only a fifth of the estimated cost of transition.

Any future Government wishing to travel the path of Net Zero must make the choices of reducing public services and mandating savage cuts in household expenditure. Needless to say, the general population is in almost total ignorance about these realities. Hughes notes that the electorate has given no indication that they are willing to bear the costs involved. “Indeed until now all they have been told is that there are few or no trade-offs required, and technology will somehow magically solve everything.”

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

The Ozone Hole and Lower Stratospheric Temperature

Were NASA lying, or had they simply not seen the data? If they hadn’t seen the data then did they make their statement without checking the data? The South Pole would have to be the first place to look for pre-1979 ozone data relevant to the ozone hole. Or had the data been found to be wrong? – I could find no reference in the literature to the ozone data having been wrong.

From Watts Up With That?

or Should the Montreal Protocol be terminated?

Mike Jonas,

For years, I had wondered about the Montreal Protocol and the ozone hole that started in 1979, and whether the science behind it all had been twisted to suit DuPont or others. But where would you look to find the answer? Then, last year, I saw a report that the ozone hole, which had been recovering as expected, was suddenly as large as ever. It could have been this report. So I started downloading some data. I knew that it would be a lot of work, I had no idea exactly what I would be looking for, and I suspected that I wouldn’t find anything. Lots of others must have looked and found nothing.

I was stunned by the first significant thing I found: There was an ozone hole long before 1979.

But first, why did I suspect twisting by DuPont? Well, I think ‘everyone’ did back then, but no-one could prove anything. It certainly looked like some sort of shenanigans were going on. For a start, the ozone hole was defined in the 1980s as the area of ozone less than 220 Dobson Units (DU). Why precisely 220? Well, it was clear that the number 220 was chosen so that the ozone hole started in 1979. A different number would have given a different start date, and it seems they really did want the ozone hole to start in 1979. It had nothing to do with 220 DU being some sort of safe level, the number was plucked out of the air just like today’s ‘need’ to restrict global warming to precisely 1.5C. DuPont’s lucrative patent for Freon (basically a chlorofluorocarbon (CFC)) expired in 1979. In 1974, with their Freon income to protect, the Chair of DuPont said that “ozone depletion theory is “a science fiction tale … a load of rubbish … utter nonsense”“. But in the 1980s DuPont changed its tune when it was clear that they would profit more from a replacement product. The prime function of the Montreal Protocol seems to be to sustain the manufacture of unnecessarily expensive refrigerants. Incidentally, Wikipedia joined in the shenanigans, no doubt for its own purposes, using the ozone hole to attack Fred Singer. Wikipedia (thank you, Wayback Machine), said: “Some atmospheric scientists (for instance Fred Singer, founder of SEPP and also a global warming skeptic) and industry-sponsored advocacy groups question or completely deny a link between CFCs and ozone depletion. It is fairly common to see completely nonsensical arguments …“. Today’s Wikipedia entry has no mention of Fred Singer or the “completely nonsensical arguments” which appear not to have been said by him anyway.

But I digress.

I downloaded a lot of data files for the southern hemisphere (Willis Eschenbach knows all about how many files you need to download sometimes), and loaded them into old-fashioned spreadsheets in my ancient desktop (sorry, w, I never got round to using R). When I looked at the ozone data for the south pole, there were ozone holes in 1964, 1966, 1969, 1974 and 1977. They may have been less pronounced than in more recent years, but they were there. I have written it up, it has been published, and my paper is open-access at WJARR. CFCs were oh so close to zero at the first of those ozone holes …….

There are obvious questions arising from this: If the ozone measurements at the South Pole showed column ozone repeatedly below 220 DU well before 1979, how could NASA’s Ozone Watch say ” total ozone values of less than 220 Dobson Units were not found in the historic observations over Antarctica prior to 1979“? Were NASA lying, or had they simply not seen the data? If they hadn’t seen the data then did they make their statement without checking the data? The South Pole would have to be the first place to look for pre-1979 ozone data relevant to the ozone hole. Or had the data been found to be wrong? – I could find no reference in the literature to the ozone data having been wrong.

If the gatekeepers ever take the trouble to refute my finding, maybe they will do it the way they refuted Qing-Bin Lu’s 2022 finding of a tropical ‘ozone hole’ – they refuted it by deflection (I refer to Qing-Bin Lu’s paper in my paper). Qing-Bin Lu was very careful to say that the standard definition of an ozone hole – ozone less than 220 DU – was not used, but the critics managed to leverage “looking at percentage changes in ozone, rather than absolute changes” into “the research was riddled with serious errors and unsubstantiated assertions“. The detail in the criticisms actually supports Qing-Bin Lu’s findings, but it seems the critics just didn’t want an ozone hole anywhere outside the Antarctic. Another curious thing about it all is that Qing-Bin Lu was giving them another opportunity for scare-mongering – why didn’t they take that up? Was it because this ‘ozone hole’, reportedly seven times larger than the Antarctic ozone hole and above where a lot of people actually lived, was natural?

The other thing of note that I found as I ploughed through the data was that the annual ozone minima not only didn’t correlate very well with CFC data, but also looked more like a phase change. Here’s my Figure 4, illustrating it:

I was careful to derive the phases mathematically not manually, but it would obviously be credible to draw the phases differently. I did a check through the literature, and Bingo! an early 1980s phase change in south pole surface temperature had been detected (Lazzara et al 2012). Then I checked the south pole radiosonde temperature data, and there was a temperature phase change in the lower stratosphere and in the troposphere too. Everything tallied. Another thing I discovered after submitting the paper was that Qing-Bin Lu’s tropical ‘ozone hole’ is thought to have started in the 1980s – that tallies too.

My paper covers both the non-correlation of ozone with CFCs and the matching phase changes in ozone and temperature. Those who don’t like non-emphatic words like ‘could’ and ‘suggests’ will be disappointed, but it really isn’t possible to prove much definitively from correlation or non-correlation with limited data. The analysis is complicated by the relationship between ozone and temperature being bi-directional (each affects the other), and of course, air moves. My paper does not argue against chemical reactions involving ozone and CFCs, but it does highlight that it really isn’t known just how much of the ozone hole the CFCs are responsible for.

Incidentally, the fact that air moves is very relevant. Say there’s an ozone hole near the south pole. Then it moves a little. One day, ozone at the south pole is over 220 DU, the next day it’s under. The ozone hole hasn’t changed at all, it just moved a little. There are many days in the south pole ozone record where there is a large change from the previous day.

My paper’s Abstract:

Abstract

Depletion of ozone over Antarctica was first observed in the late 1970s, and discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole was announced in the 1980s as having started in 1979. The ozone hole was defined as the area with total column ozone less than 220 Dobson units. Analysis of ozone, temperature, chlorofluorocarbon and nitrous oxide data from 1963 onwards suggests that the annual ozone minimum at the South Pole is related to lower stratospheric temperature independently of chlorofluorocarbons and nitrous oxide. There were ozone holes, ie. column ozone less than 220 Dobson Units, at the South Pole in several years before 1979 (the date that the ozone hole is reported to have first appeared) when chlorofluorocarbon concentrations were much lower than today and lower than in 1979. An early 1980s phase change in the lower stratospheric temperature at the South Pole at altitudes between 250 hPa and 100 hPa, and at some lower altitudes, coincides with a phase change in the annual South Pole ozone minimum. The phase change is not visible in chlorofluorocarbon or nitrous oxide data. This raises the possibility that, over a multi-annual or decadal timescale, lower stratospheric temperature has more effect than chlorofluorocarbons or nitrous oxide on atmospheric ozone concentration over the South Pole. Alternatively, temperature and ozone may both be reacting to some other influence.

The paper is open access and can be read in full at https://wjarr.com/sites/default/files/WJARR-2024-0531.pdf.

I mentioned above that this study would be a lot of work. A lot of the work is ploughing through the literature to see what has been discovered already, and checking that what I was finding hadn’t been found or refuted already. As I read the literature, I formed the opinion that a lot of scientists were sceptical of the CFC-depletion narrative, but they couldn’t quite put their finger on anything that definitively disproved it, so they were restricted in what they could say about it. Maybe my findings will help. Or, if NASA really did lie about ozone levels, or even if they simply ignored the data, then should the Montreal Protocol be ditched anyway?

There’s a really interesting statement in a phys.org article: “Lu’s observation of the ozone hole comes as a surprise to his peers in the scientific community, since it was not predicted by conventional photochemical models. His observed data agree well with the cosmic-ray-driven electron reaction (CRE) model and strongly indicate the identical physical mechanism working for both Antarctic and tropical ozone holes.“. Unfortunately, I didn’t see that until later.

I ask above whether the Montreal Protocol should be ditched. My study didn’t look at CFC chemistry, so it isn’t about that. The question is whether the Montreal Protocol is based on a lie. If CFCs are to be banned, they should only be banned for a valid reason. And remember, CFCs were very close to zero at the first of those ozone holes and there is no fuss about natural ozone depletion over where millions of people actually live. But in the paper I couldn’t say explicitly that anyone lied, so I said we would have to wait until ozone levels correlate with one of temperature and CFCs more than with the other. That could take a long time, especially if there’s another phase change. The reality is I suspect even worse – we will have to wait for the gatekeepers to get out of the way.

PS.

In the man-made CO2 “climate change” narrative, increasing CO2 supposedly cools the stratosphere. A global phase change in stratospheric temperature followed by decades of no temperature trend would pretty well knock that narrative on the head too. Qing-Bin Lu: “all the datasets show that significant O3[ozone] or LST [Lower Stratospheric Temperature] reductions only occurred in the 1980s and 1990s with no significant trends over the past ∼25 years. This is similar to the observation by Polvani et al. and that reported in the newest IPCC AR6. The latter states “most datasets show that lower stratospheric temperatures have stabilized since the mid-1990s with no significant change over the last 20 years” “. [my bold] Maybe that’s another reason why they were so keen to tear down Qing-Bin Lu’s paper.

Addendum from Charles

The article above leaves out the fact that satellite observations began just as the “Hole” was “Discovered” with the launch of The Nimbus 7 satellite on October 4th 1978. The Nimbus 7 contained the TOMS  (Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer).

Initially, the dearth of ozone was not noticed because the data was so far off from the expected range that it was discarded as invalid by the data processing algorithms. When the fact that something like 2/3rds of the instrument’s measurements were being discarded was finally noticed and analyzed, that’s when the panic set in about the “Hole in the Ozone”.

While the article above does cite a distinct global polar temperature regime change in the late 70’s that probably affected the ozone levels, it just seems too much of a coincidence that the panic set in just as a new measurement technique was deployed. Supposedly the TOMS measurements match ground based measurements to a reasonable degree; however, like the fact that “sea level acceleration” only shows up in Jason satellite measurements and not in tide gauges, there is a not insignificant chance that the “Ozone Hole” is an artifact of instrument changes.

Here is a clip from a PBS documentary on the discovery of the “Hole” describing the discarding of out of expected range measurements and the ensuing panic when the data didn’t match preconceived expectations.

https://www.pbs.org/video/discovering-ozone-hole-h3bfqp

Enron and Greenpeace: An Exchange with Martin Porter

“Enron was the ‘greens’ favorite company, remember? Enron, in the words of a Greenpeace ex, was ‘the company most responsible for sparking off the greenhouse civil war in the hydrocarbon business.’”

From The Master Resource

By Robert Bradley Jr. 

“Enron was the ‘greens’ favorite company, remember? Enron, in the words of a Greenpeace ex, was ‘the company most responsible for sparking off the greenhouse civil war in the hydrocarbon business.’”

Greenpeace was a fan of “green” Enron in the old days. Today, a Greenpeace UK leader has been trying to debunk me, based on my prior association with Enron and Ken Lay. And it has backfired with him just like it backfired when Joe Romm of Climate Progress tried the same thing 15 years ago.

Here is our exchange. I report, you decide. My final comment follows.

Martin Porter: so, tell us what it was like working for one of the most corrupt companies in US history? Did you ever visit your old Enron boss in jail??!?

Porter: … Do you miss those Enron days Rob Bradley??!?

Bradley: Enron was the “greens” favorite company, remember? Enron, in the words of a Greenpeace ex, was “the company most responsible for sparking off the greenhouse civil war in the hydrocarbon business.” [Jeremy Leggett, The Carbon War (London: Penguin Books, 1999, p. 204)]. And the Kyoto memo:

———-

Bradley: Profitable opportunities will trump DEI emotionalism. Fossil fuels are for the masses, remember. Not the climate elite driving their Teslas.

Martin Porter: Says the guy who used to work for a crook

Bradley: Ken Lay? The beloved ‘green’ chairman of Enron? Remember: Enron’s first crime that set the tone for what followed was with a wind farm. But I repeat myself with an issue that backfires on you/Greenpeace.

Porter: why? Just because a bunch of crooks tried to make themselves look green it’s nothing to do with Greenpeace. The whole sorry story does ask questions on ‘green capitalism’ though.

Bradley: You forgot my quotation from Greenpeacer Jeremy Leggett. didn’t you. [“the company most responsible for sparking off the greenhouse civil war in the hydrocarbon business.” Jeremy Leggett, The Carbon War (London: Penguin Books, 1999, p. 204)].

Porter: hardly a ringing endorsement though, was it?

Bradley: Read his book for context. Leggett was surprised and elated! (The more homework you do, the more you might question the Climate Industrial Complex.)

Porter: I think we were all very pleased Enron was accepting climate science when most others in the oil industry weren’t, and it did help break up the united front of denial by the fossil fuel industry. Unfortunately it was all bullshit to cover massive fraud.

Bradley: Actually, internally, it was the other way around. The science behind climate alarmism was exposed as speculative. An executive on the renewables side even asked if the implication was that CO2 should be subsidized, not penalized, because of settled CO2 science. Please stop guessing … wrong.

Bradley: Yes, “Unfortunately it was all bullshit to cover massive fraud.” That’s politicized energy and a reason you should be as critical of the Climate Industrial Complex as you are of fossil fuels. You might even change your views!

Martin Porter: Well, we tried business without government control and the result was the Credit Crunch and Enron, but you were there for that so I don’t need to tell you.

Bradley: Just the opposite, sir. Government intervention created an Enron and fooled just about everyone. Enron: The Perils of Interventionism – Econlib

Final Comment

With thousands of connections on LinkedIn and free market conversations ongoing, at times I have to push back on ad hominem, one being my past association with Enron where I worked for 16 years. My Political Capitalism website anticipates and debunks this line of attack. No doubt many of my detractors have had to realize that ol’ Bad Enron was all “green” with climate alarm and big investments in wind and solar.

Enron Energy Services also was promising “Kyoto compliant” energy efficiency gains (10 percent reduced usage) in its long-term energy outsourcing contracts. It was a fraud based on ‘mark to model’ net present value accounting.

Enron was the epitome of fake ‘green’ energy. ‘Green’ energy today is Enron on a much larger scale. Not good for the anti-CO2, anti-industrialization worldview, after all.

A funny story in this regard concerns Enron CEO Jeff Skilling, who had to quell the concern of a newly hired coal executive that Enron was going to hide its coal push. “Mike,” Skilling assured, “we are a green energy company, but the green stands for money.” [1] And calculator-driven business ethics it is!

————

[1] Bradley interview with Michael Beyer and George McClellan, Enron Corp., April 10, 2021. Quoted in Bradley, Capitalism at Work: Business, Government, and Energy (M&M Scrivener Press, 2009), p. 310.

Has the Melbourne Extinction Rebellion Protest Driven Up CO2 Emissions?

An extinction Rebellion road block on a major Melbourne access road forced commuters to wait in a queue, or use roads with lots of start / stop traffic lights.

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

An extinction Rebellion road block on a major Melbourne access road forced commuters to wait in a queue, or use roads with lots of start / stop traffic lights.

Extinction Rebellion protesters cause traffic chaos as they block Melbourne’s West Gate Bridge at peak-hour

Climate change activists have deployed a large truck to block three lanes of the West Gate Bridge during peak-hour traffic on Tuesday morning. 

Amy Roulston Digital Reporter
March 5, 2024 – 8:30AM

Climate activists have sparked traffic chaos in Melbourne on Tuesday morning by positioning a large truck on West Gate Bridge during peak-hour.

Three protesters from Extinction Rebellion Victoria stood on top of the truck that was parked perpendicular across three West Gate Bridge lanes, with a large banner draped over the side reading “declare a climate emergency”.

…

Three of the five lanes on the bridge were initially closed, before another was forced to shut an hour later, forcing angry commuters to merge into one remaining lane.

Read more: https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/extinction-rebellion-protesters-cause-traffic-chaos-as-they-block-melbournes-west-gate-bridge-at-peakhour/news-story/34d1257729afd2cfee7a53a35eeb979a

The protestors were later arrested. At least one of the protestors, Deanna Coco, was previously arrested for creating an illegal road block on a major Sydney access road. She was released a year ago after a judge quashed a 15 month jail sentence on the grounds that police falsely claimed Deanna’s protest had blocked an ambulance with its lights flashing.

This time Deanna received a much lighter sentence than the 15 months she successfully appealed in New South Wales, the Victorian magistrate only sentenced her to 21 days for disrupting traffic. Deanna thinks she’s a climate suffragette, she has said so on several occasions. I’m sure the Melbourne magistrate followed the letter of the law, but I suspect Deanna staged the protest in Victoria, because weak anti-road disruption laws in Victoria mean Victoria is a soft target compared to New South Wales, which hardened its road disruption laws in 2022. I suspect Deanna and her friends will be back, targeting Melbourne commuters again, or commuters in another soft target state, either later this year or next year.

It is difficult to estimate how much additional CO2 this protest released, a lot of people probably gave up on the traffic and worked from home that day. But when you take into account all those internal combustion engines idling, 20 miles of start stop traffic either on the alternative routes or squeezing through the bottleneck on the main access road which the XR protest created, I wouldn’t be surprised if the XR protest increased Melbourne commuter CO2 emissions several times over normal levels. Of course, climate protestors triggering the release of lots of additional CO2 is nothing new.