Category Archives: climate

Climate as Seen through Arctic Sea Ice

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s a graph of Arctic sea ice growth year on year, via Watts Up With That:arcticseaice

Looks to me like positive growth has vastly outstripped negative growth.  Indeed, here’s Anthony Watt’s take on the matter [emphasis in the original]:

Since hitting its earliest minimum extent since 1997, Arctic sea ice has been expanding at a phenomenal rate. Already it is greater than at the same date in 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2015. Put another way, it is the fourth highest extent in the last ten years. Even more remarkably, ice growth since the start of the month is actually the greatest on record, since daily figures started to be kept in 1987.

Hmm….

YGTBSM

Posted on by
Reply

This is how out of touch the Democratic Party and this administration is.

Secretary of State John Kerry said in Vienna on Friday that air conditioners and refrigerators are as big of a threat to life as the threat of terrorism posed by groups like the Islamic State.

That’s just breathtaking.

Of course, it’s also true that a man said that in America a man has the right to be stupid if he wants to be.

Some More Thoughts on Climate

Posted on by
Reply

…via Watts Up With That?

On the matter of Earth suffering the fate of Venus [boldface emphasis in the original, italics emphasis added]:

  • Venus is closer to the Sun. Venus is aprox 0.72 AU distant from the sun (72% of Earth’s), with a total solar irradiance (TSI) almost 2x that of Earth.
  • Venus has a denser atmosphere. The pressure on Venus is 93x that of Earth, the equivalent of almost 1 kilometer under the ocean. This is probably the largest factor causing its high temperature.
  • The clouds of Venus are mostly sulphuric acid (not water vapor)—a powerful greenhouse agent.
  • The atmosphere of Venus has nearly 3000x more CO2 than Earth’s atmosphere. Venus is 96.5% CO2 by volume vs 380 [parts] per million for Earth (0.038%). Goldblatt el al say that with CO2 at 30,000 ppm Earth would have “no stable temperate climate.” That would require burning 10x more than Earth’s estimated fossil fuel resources.

On the matter of Earth’s own history.  From our Eocene period (56 million to 34 million years ago, the age when mammals began taking over from the dinosaurs):

  • With the solar constant 1% less than today and a few thousand ppmv CO2, the mean temperature was 10oK (roughly 20oF) warmer than today. With CO2 and temperature both higher then than we expect in the foreseeable future, this implies that an anthropogenic runaway greenhouse is unlikely.
  • We expect a runaway greenhouse on Earth 1.5 billion years hence if water is the only greenhouse gas, or sooner if there are others.

That last, especially, would seem to be a period beyond the useful timeframe of even the most hubristic climatista’s policy demands.

Climate and Lawless Democrats

Posted on by
Reply

Recall that Democratic Party State Attorneys General and the Virgin Islands territorial Attorney General have subpoenaed private enterprises for all correspondence related to objections to political agendas touting climate warming and the need to redistribute wealth to “green” energy crony companies.  These subpoenas are intended to gain access to correspondence with anyone at all, and the companies have been threatened by these AGs with RICO proceedings if the victim target companies don’t comply.

In response to that, several of those target companies have countersued, demanding the AGs’ documents related to the AG cases, among other things under FOIA.  The AGs have refused to supply the requested documents, citing…secrecy.

Democratic attorneys general led by New York’s Eric Schneiderman are seeking to block efforts to obtain documents about their efforts by invoking an overbroad claim to secrecy in ongoing legal proceedings, according to the Energy and Environment (E&E) Legal Institute.

According to Chris Horner of E&E,

These activist AGs are trying to write themselves out from freedom of information laws their legislatures have written them into.  …they are hiding behavior that seems to be precisely the sort of abuse lawmakers sought to expose to sunlight when deciding to cover their States’ chief law enforcement officers under FOIA laws….

In fact, these AGs appear to have preemptively colluded in their secrecy.  The AGs involved

circulated a common interest agreement in March that detailed their cooperation in the Exxon matter.  It explicitly prohibited signatories from sharing information about the legal campaign.

The agreement stipulated that if any relevant information “is demanded under a public records law, the party receiving the request shall … refuse to disclose any shared information unless otherwise required by law.”

Oddly, that agreement was discovered in the course of a prior E&E FOIA request; hence the apparent effort to ignore current FOIAs.

Because facts upset their predetermined narrative and undermine their political standing.