Do Cosmic Rays Aid in Lightning Creation?

The actual mechanisms of how lightning works have been eluding scientists for a very long time. Here’s a new idea that might explain some of it.

Cosmic rays interacting with water droplets within thunderclouds could play an important role in initiating lightning strikes. That is the claim of researchers in Russia, who have studied the radio signals emitted during thousands of lightning strikes. The work could provide new insights into how and why lightning occurs in the first place.

New insights into what triggers lightning

Abstract

Is there a Greenhouse Effect?

Atmospheric physicists disagree.

Both sides claim the other doesn’t know their thermodynamics. (Is that why I heard it called ThermoGodDammics in college?)

On Facebook, for more “discussion:”

• Watts Up With That FB Group
• There is No Greenhouse Effect FB Group

I don’t have the physics or the math to really dig into it and I’m just going to sit back and read the stuff as it comes to my attention. However, I do suspect that a lot of the “discussion” is due to poor choice of terminology and a smearing of definitions.

For example: Can a cooler object warm a warmer object? You’ll be warmer inside your Igloo than you will be outside of it and you’ll be warmer in a nice coat or blanket than without. Yet all are cooler than you and they still “warm” you. But does the atmosphere and IR work the same way?

I think everyone agrees the the atmosphere is warmer with an atmosphere than without, right? And with much less day/night variation than it would have with no atmosphere (eg: the moon.)

And from there it gets more interesting…

So, I’m going to link to the “Yes!” and “No!” posts as I find them. This post will be updated periodically. Perhaps a conclusion or common ground will be reached, someday. Till then, I’m reaching for the popcorn.

Yes, There IS a GH Effect. Dr. Roy Spencer has challenged the Slayers (of the GH effect theory, to either “put up or shut up.” Here is the article Dr. S. presents. WUWT Article Eschenbach on the The R. W. Wood Experiment	No, There is NOT a GH Effect Principia Scientific responds to Dr. Spencer’s challenge. Here it is Also on Climate of Sophistry Principia adds a followup Climate of Sophistry responds to Eschenbach
JoNova: And with over 1,100 comments (!!) as of this link, we have: A discussion of the Slaying the Sky Dragon science: Is the Greenhouse Effect a Sky Dragon Myth? (Here’s the full PDF of this article.) Why greenhouse gas warming doesn’t break the second law of thermodynamics So what is the Second Darn Law?	Radical New Hypothesis on the Effect of Greenhouse Gases: Michael Hammer, an engineer who specializes in spectroscopy, is also sceptical of the GCM but his criticism is more fundamental.  In the following paper, using the basic laws of spectroscopy, he shows that a significant portion of energy loss from the Earth’s surface is by direction radiation to space at wavelengths not absorbed by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
Convection, Venus, Thought Experiments and Tall Rooms Full of Gas – A Discussion	The atmospheric greenhouse effect is really just an artifact of a fictional boundary condition (PDF) Five fatal flaws the greenhouse effect (GHE) “theory” MUST address. (PDF)
Luboš Motl: SciAm, Gavin Schmidt despise climate facts	American Thinker: The Hidden Flaw in Greenhouse Theory
	two

A Dose of Reality for Alternative Energy

And that dose of reality is the fossil fuel that needed to make it real. The rare earths that are required which just switch our dependencies from one country to the other. The large amount of diesel fuel that’s required to ship pieces from one place to another.

Checxk this our from AlbertaOilMagazine.com:

Consider this oddball energy scheme. A tree is cut down in British Columbia with a diesel-fueled chainsaw. The trunk is transported on a truck, also running on diesel, to a sawmill. An automated production line makes a load of woodchips for a 5,000-kilometer delivery by diesel train or truck to an East Coast port.

Then more fossil fuel-burning transportation machinery ships the chips across the Atlantic Ocean and Europe to a power plant which is mandated to produce 20 per cent renewable energy. These wood chips are officially considered carbon neutral and the energy they produce is called clean.

It’s being done because under current regulations it makes sense economically. But as a way to attain environmental goals that inspire policies like the 20 per cent renewable energy requirement, it is a disaster. Not only is the wood-chip scheme far from carbon neutral, it is not going to improve energy security and only deepens the dependence on the fossil fuels it is supposed to replace.

….

Of nine challenges that he describes, one of the biggest is the dependence of renewable energy technology on non-renewable natural resources such as the lithium used to produce car batteries or the rare earths used in LED lights, magnets on windmills and PV panels. Switching energy forms just means trading dependence on Middle Eastern oil for reliance on lithium from Bolivia or Chinese rare earths. China saw its opportunity and has curtailed exports of rare earths in order to force the alternative energy equipment industry to locate there.

Excellent article. Here’s the rest: How to exacerbate a fossil-fuel addiction

Peer Review and Faking Data

Fist off: Peer Review, for all it’s warts, seems to be the best system we have for proofing papers against the various errors that can creep in. It’s subject to issues ranging from missed errors to “pal-review” to fraud, but what’s the alternative?

But it does need to be “cleaned up.”

From WUWT:

An article in the New York Times chronicles the descent of a sociologist into wholesale fraud. It is worth reading the whole article, because I believe it offers insight into some of the pressures, temptations, and self-rationalizations that many scientists struggle with.

And the full story: from the NT Times

Resources

• Most Published Medical Research Findings are False?
• http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/
  
• http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-03/investigators-discover-50th-fake-study-disgraced-dutch-psychologist

The Psychology of Expertise, or How we Think

This is a really interesting piece from NoFrakkingConsensus on why predictions, in any field, tend to be so bad and yet we keep making them. And we make them with confidence. A great example is the climate and all the broken predictions (er, um… “projections.”)

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman has spent his life studying human judgment and decision-making. At 79, he is the author of the 2011 award-winning, best-selling book Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Since we hear so much about the 2007 Peace Prize that recognized the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it’s worth mentioning that Kahneman received the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002.

When his book first appeared, Kahneman wrote a long essay (3,400 words) for the New York Times magazine. Subtitled The Hazards of Confidence, it’s a fascinating read that doesn’t mention climate change, global warming, or scientists even once. But its insights are highly relevant to the climate debate.

Here’s the rest.

Sanity in the Media

As time goes on and the CAGW meme breaks down we will be seeing bits of sanity appearing in various traditional media (Main Stream Media, aka MSM.) It’ll probably be awhile before it happens in the US, though. Most US Media is lovingly in bed with the Obama regime and its love for the CAGW hysteria.

Newest notes are on top.

5/16/13:

No Virgina, sea level rise (what little there may be of it) is not drowning those islands. WUWT has a pic from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation showing this. Here’s the ABCnews post, at least until they remove it.

5/14/13

May 14 (Reuters) – A melt of ice on Greenland and Antarctica is likely to be less severe than expected this century, limiting sea level rise to a maximum of 69 cm (27 inches), an international study said on Tuesday.

NYT backs off the hysteria by a small bit: Some recent scientific papers have made a splash by claiming that the answer might not be as bad as previously feared. This work — if it holds up — offers the tantalizing possibility that climate change might be slow and limited enough that human society could adapt to it without major trauma.

NoTricksZone adds some commentary to the NYT article, as does WUWT.

From Australia 

SEA level rises triggered by Greenland’s melting glaciers will be far less severe than previously thought, new modelling suggests.

European and US researchers predict the impact on sea levels from the island’s melting glaciers could be as little as 7 per cent of previous projections of more than half a metre.

Here (login is required.)

More from Germany (4/29)

Media outlets in Europe are beginning to question all the global warming claims, especially as Central Europe reels from one of its coldest springs in living memory.

The article is dubbed: “Scientists have embarrassed themselves: climate change is not happening.”

http://notrickszone.com/2013/04/29/german-economics-magazine-trust-in-climate-science-has-been-shaken-scientists-have-embarrassed-themselves/

Die Zeit Shocks Readers

Now that the global mean temperature curve has drifted out of and below the IPCC’s projected range, panic is breaking out.

The mother of German green weeklies, Die Zeit, appears to be taking measurements at the back of the house in preparation for the installation of a back door! Rahmstorf is back there with them, trying to talk them out of it.

Leading lefty journalist Harald Martenstein of Die Zeit, a weekly that recently portrayed Marc Morano as the Don Corleone of the North American climate denial syndicate, has an amusingly satirical essay on the misfortunes of climate science and modeling: On the surprises of climate change. Hat/tip: klimazwiebel. If you can read German, his essay is a jewel in irony and humor to behold. Effective because few things convey a message better than music or humor.

Martenstein, once a devout believer of the global warming religion, apparently he has been struggling to reconcile the glaring differences between climate expectations and hard reality.

Mother Of German Green Weeklies, Die Zeit, Shocks Readers…Now Casts Doubt On Global Warming!

And in Russia:

Russian Academy Of Sciences Experts Warn Of Imminent Cold Period: “Global Warming Is A Marketing Trick” By P Gosselin on 11. April 2013

The European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE) here links to an article published by Stimme Russlands (Voice of Russia). The article is titled: Die Welt vor einer Eiszeit, in English: The World On The Verge Of An Ice Age.

Reports of global cooling are becoming more frequent. FLASHBACK: 30 experts predict cooling.

You’ll notice that this Voice of Russia report is more than a month old, and so one wonders why it was never picked up by the western mainstream media.

The article writes that Russian scientists are predicting that “a little ice age will begin in 2014“. The article adds….

Here’s the article: Russian Academy Of Sciences Experts Warn Of Imminent Cold Period

Yahoo News: 

WASHINGTON (AP) — Last year’s huge drought was a freak of nature that wasn’t caused by man-made global warming, a new federal science study finds.

Scientists say the lack of moisture usually pushed up from the Gulf of Mexico was the main reason for the drought in the nation’s midsection.

Thursday’s report by dozens of scientists from five different federal agencies looked into why forecasters didn’t see the drought coming. The researchers concluded that it was so unusual and unpredictable that it couldn’t have been forecast.

“This is one of those events that comes along once every couple hundreds of years,” said lead author Martin Hoerling, a research meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Climate change was not a significant part, if any, of the event.”

Report: Global warming didn’t cause big US drought

UK’s Met Office Internal Climate Report Differs from What They Say to the Press.

Following the wet summer in the UK last year, the  Met Office provided the Environment Agency with a briefing document, giving an overview of the weather. This was discussed at the September Board Meeting of the Environment Agency, which Met Office officials attended.

As far as I know, this document, which I obtained through FOI, has never entered the public domain. It is brutally honest in admitting how little the Met’s scientists understand about what affects our climate, and, in particular, what caused the unusual weather last year. This is in stark contrast to many of the hyped up claims, made in public statements in the recent past by, among others, the Met Office themselves.

The full document is reproduced below, but there are four particular areas I wish to focus on.

Met Office’s Private Briefing Document For The Environment Agency

Various links to Sane Media from Climate Depot – here.

The Economist says that The climate may be heating up less in response to greenhouse-gas emissions than was once thought. But that does not mean the problem is going away

OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.”

Obviously they still believe, but they’re not quite as hysterical as before. Here’s the rest.

A Denmark paper runs a four page spread on the hysteria: 

The Jyllands-Posten piece represents another major step by important elements of the European media in taking a tougher and more critical look at climate science. Prominent climate scientists are speaking out, and the media is handing them the megaphone.

Here it is

The UK’s MailOnline rips into the ridiculous energy policies of the UK politicians. 

He wants to hire yet more civil servants to set up a ‘Heat Network Unit’ to provide ‘expert advice’.
And he wants us to pay for ’100 green apprenticeships’ for ‘young people to work in smallscale renewable technologies’.

What planet is this man living on? He has only to step outside his centrally heated Whitehall office to see that the rest of us are having to struggle through the coldest March for 50 years.

Yet, just when we need heat and light for our homes and workplaces more than ever, we are rapidly heading for by far the most serious energy crisis this country has ever faced.

We learned at the weekend that Britain’s gas supplies have run so perilously low that we could be depending on just two giant tankers imported from the Middle East to heat our homes at a time when world gas prices are soaring.

Last week, we also lost two more of our major coal-fired power stations, forced to close down by an EU pollution directive – leading the head of our second-largest power company, SSE, to warn our generating capacity is being cut back so far that major blackouts may soon be inevitable.

The article really tears into them. Read more here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2299607/As-freezing-Britain-faces-grave-energy-crisis-ministers-unveil-green-gimmicks-eco-taxes.html#ixzz2OlJmwUKQ

Senate Dems Give the Finger

In a show of complete and utter contempt for anything resembling fiscal rationality the Democrats of the US Senate have offered up a budget.

A budget that increases spending by 62% over the next ten years.

That ain’t Bush’s fault.

On Wednesday, WA Sen. Patty Murray unveiled the first budget proposal from Senate Democrats in 4 years. Looking at the top-line numbers, it is easy to see why the Democrats were so coy with their spending plans. Virtually ignoring the debt crisis that is causing the public deep anxiety, the Democrats plan to boost spending by 62% over the next ten years.

Here’s the rest: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/03/14/senate-dem-budget-hikes-spending-62

I expect most of the Democrat media (NY Times, etc.) will be praising the utter wonderfulness of this budget.

Here Come the Activists, into the IPCC

It’s well known that at least of part of the IPCC is activist driven. This doesn’t matter to the alarmist/hysteric crowd and is only slightly bothersome to the warmists. The rest of us, however…

It’s official. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is cognitively impaired. It is wholly incapable of learning from its mistakes.

The IPCC is comprised of three working groups. Working Group 3 is led by Ottmar Edenhofer, an economist at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Three days ago that institute posted an announcement on its website calling for “expert reviewers” to provide feedback to Working Group 3′s draft report. The first paragraph of that announcement includes the following:

The scientists who are organizing this process ask for voluntary contributions from experts across all sectors, from scholars to business people or NGO representatives. [bold added]

Here we go again. The World Wildlife Fund is an NGO. Greenpeace is an NGO. The people who work for those organizations are not scientific experts. They are advocates, activists, and partisans. They have an agenda. They are paid a salary to advance that agenda.

Go here for the rest: IPCC Invites In the Activists

More:

• IPCC, Pachauri, and “Distinguished Scientists”
• Greenpeace is Lead Author of IPCC Report
• IPCC Official Announces the Agenda
• It’s Worse Than We Thought
• IPCC and Sourcing Data from WWF

Environmentalists and Creationists Find the Common Ground

It’s very simple. Since everything bad is caused by humans and since without humans nothing bad would ever happen, the dinosaurs must have been killed by humans!!!

Terrific parody here:

(AP) – It was as odd a gathering as it was unexpected. Several hundred scientists, representing over two-dozen of North America’s most respected universities and institutes, holding a weeklong seminar with “creationists” who reject evolution and modern theories about the age of the earth. And they had gathered not to debate, but to promote a common goal – to make it known that humans and dinosaurs did indeed exist together at the same time.

“I’m very proud to have been able to put this conference together,” Dr. Edward Schoenfeld, professor of environmental science at UCLA, told the AP. Dr. Schoenfeld is a leading voice in the fastest-growing sector of the scientific community – the Anthropogenicists. “Anthropogenicists understand that all things on earth are, and have always been, man-caused.

Weather, climate, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, oceanic temperatures, red tides, species extinctions, and species-on-species violence. It’s all man-caused,” Dr. Schoenfeld explained. “Without humans, there would be nothing in this life but bliss. Animals would live together in peace, in perfect mild temperatures, with no threats beyond a natural death from old age.”

Dr. Schoenfeld’s organization, the Anthropogenic Scientific Scholars Educational Society, has been at the forefront of forcing governments to face the consequences of man-made global warming. “We’ve done amazing things. We’ve gotten governments to raise taxes, ban energy production, close factories, outlaw asthma inhalers, force people to use mercury-filled lightbulbs, and even install non-energy consuming traffic lights that can’t be seen when it snows.

Every time a human is killed by one of those things, I think to myself, another small victory for Anthropogenicism,” said Dr. Andre Billaud, chair of the environmental sciences department at the University of Oregon. Dr. Billaud has been on the forefront of the recent attempts to ban and stigmatize cat ownership, on the grounds that it creates a climate of violence between cats and rodents.

“The anti-science know-nothings will claim that cats killing rodents and birds is ‘natural.’ That it is part of some koo-koo concept of a ‘natural order.’ Such ignorance!” Dr. Billaud proclaims. “It is, like everything else, human-caused. In Anthropogenicism, one finds the answers to all environmental issues.”

Here’s the rest: ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENTISTS” FIND COMMON GROUND WITH CREATIONISTS REGARDING HUMANS AND DINOSAURS

Time to Vote on the #1 Blogs

It’s time for the Bloggies Awards.

Go here for all the info and instructions and how to be counted.