How Large Is the Urban Heat Island Effect?

Does the urban heat island effects influence global temperature trends?

Roy Spencer claims, without proof, that they do. Berkeley Earth (BEST) found they do not, after having actually examined the global thermometer set six ways from Sunday with a skeptical eye:

"The Urban Heat Island effect is real. Berkeley’s analysis focused on the question of whether this effect biases the global land average. Our UHI paper analyzing this indicates that the urban heat island effect on our global estimate of land temperatures is indistinguishable from zero."
http://berkeleyearth.org/faq/#question-15

paper:
"Influence of Urban Heating on the Global Temperature Land Average using Rural Sites Identified from MODIS Classifications," Wickham et al., Geoinfor Geostat: An Overview 2013, 1:2
http://dx.doi.org/10.4172/2327-4581.1000104
https://www.scitechnol.com/2327-4581/2327-4581-1-104.pdf

And indeed, that's been the determination for some decades; here's a 1990 paper from Nature:

"The results show that the urbanization influence in two of the most widely used hemispheric data sets is, at most, an order of magnitude less than the warming seen on a century timescale."

"Assessment of urbanization effects in time series of surface air temperature over land," P. D. Jones et al, Nature, volume 347, pages 169–172 (1990).
https://www.nature.com/articles/347169a0

Is there a way to estimate the influence of the UHI? Here's my attempt.

At the Astrobiology conference I was at a couple of weeks ago, a speaker said that on Earth cities occupy 0.2% of the globe's surface area. (It was in the context of the possibility we might see lights on an exoplanet's surface.) I also learned a new word then: "ecumenopolis" -- a planet whose entire surface is covered by one gigantic city.

If there are no UHIs, i.e. no net UHI, then the global mean average temperature (GMAT) is

Now let's say there is a UHI, the same in all cities, and those cities occupy a certain area. Then the GMAT would be something like this weighted average:

(Apologies for the different font sizes.) So the difference in GMAT between a world with a UHI and one with no UHI is

The ratio on the right-hand side is 0.002, and the urban heat island effect is, what, about 5 K (=9°F)? Then

That's your UHI. The trend will change even slower than this, per decade.

Even if the area of all the cities doubles, it will still be only about 0.02 K << global warming of 1 K.

Just a back of the envelope calculation, but it suggests the UHI is indeed small-to-negligible. Because the Earth is vaaaaaaaaaaaaaast.

Western Wildfire Acreage Doubled by Climate Change

Here's a rather stunning chart from the US National Climate Assessment 2018, Chapter 25.

It shows that since 1984, climate change has doubled the total wildfire acreage in the US west.

Note: the acreage is zero in 1984 because that's when they started counting. Results come from an ensemble of climate models.

This additional acreage comes to about 12 million acres, or 19,000 square miles. That's a little more than the area of Vermont and New Hampshire combined.

Frequent Flyers the #6 CO2-Emitting Country

I don't know what "Bitcoin territory" means here -- perhaps the same level of CO2 being produced by Bitcoin mining -- but the stats on flying are telling nonetheless.

Only 3% of the world's population flies each year. Half of those people fly once a month or more.

Together, the 1.5% of people who are frequent fliers would be the 6th largest emitting country in the world—just by their aviation emissions alone. This is Bitcoin territory here. https://t.co/vk2DQSrM1t

— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) July 26, 2019

125 Year Heat Waves

Some people complain that this is the hottest summer in the last 125 years, but I like to think of it as the coolest summer of the next 125 years! Glass half full!

— Carter Bays (@CarterBays) July 20, 2019

Yet Another Hockey Stick

There's another hockey stick in the scientific literature, this one from the PAGES 2k Consortium in Nature Geoscience. It used over 700 proxies from around the world and shows that climate is warming faster now than at any time over the last 2000 years. As Michael Mann wrote on Twitter, it re-re-re-re-re-...-re affirms the hockey stick, and we can add it to the list. Let's go to the figure:

The reconstruction only goes to the year 2000 -- we've now at 1.0 C of warming, and pushing higher.

Here's a different form of the results, presented in a phys.org news release:

More from the press release:

The results suggest that volcanic activity was responsible for variations before about 1850. After that, greenhouse gases became the dominant influence on global climate. By removing these influences in their analysis, the researchers also identified the magnitude of the random changes that cannot be traced to a specific cause. The team's data-based reconstructions also agreed with model simulations when evaluating these random changes.

As I've written before, it's easy to show that hockey stick is the expected result in the absence of significant natural forcings:

1. temperature change = (climate_sensitivty)*(change in forcing)
2. CO2 forcing = constant*log(CO2/initial_CO2)
3. Atmospheric CO2 has been increasing exponentially since the beginning of the industrial era.
• So if CO2 isn't changing, there is no temperature change -- the flat handle of the hockey stick.
• If CO2 is increasing exponentially, its forcing is changing linearly and hence so is the temperature – which is the blade of the hockey stick.
4. The initial curve upward from the shaft was when CO2 was increasing superexponentially.

It'd be far more surprising is there wasn't a hockey stick in the last 2,000 years.

**

Added 1:40 pm - PAGES 2k's calculations of 51-year trends, from the same paper:

**

Added 5:10 pm - Here's a map and proxy count of PAGES 2k's network, from their Supplementary Information. In all they used "...nearly 700 separate publicly available records from sources that contain indicators of past temperatures, such as long-lived trees, reef-building corals, ice cores, and marine and lake sediments. The data are sourced from all of Earth's continental regions and major ocean basins."

Memorializing a Lost Glacier

I wonder if this will become a thing. Researchers are going to put a plaque in Iceland memorializing the first lost glacier in that country.

It will be at the site of the now-extinct Okjökull glacier — nicknamed the “OK” glacier — in Borgarfjörður, Iceland. The hillside will be known as "Mt OK."

Deglaciation in Iceland occurs at a rate of about 40 square kilometers per year. Glaciers cover about 1/10th of the Earth’s dry land. Wikipedia says "The 13 largest glaciers [in Iceland] have an aggregate area of 11,181 km² (out of about 11,400 km² for all glaciers of Iceland).

Hey, that's 285 years worth of glaciers in Iceland. Nothing to worry about.

People in the distant future will wonder what a glacier was. They'll wonder what it was like to have a stable coastline. They'll wonder how we could have been so stupid. Maybe the Baby Boomer generation will become known as the Baby Doomers.

Warmest June

You've probably heard by now that June 2019's global mean surface temperature (GMST) was the warmest June in the records, according to both Japan's JMA and NASA GISS.

GISS was especially notable, breaking the old record (2015) by a whopping 0.09°C.

According to GISS, the northern hemisphere had its warmest June in the records, at 1.17°C above the 1951-1980 baseline. That was a record by 0.08°C. That's 1.47°C above a baseline of 1880-1909. 2.64°F. Starting to seem warm....

The southern hemisphere saw only the 6th highest June.

Land-only was also a record high, at 1.07°C above the baseline.

These are notable temperatures, given how small the recent El Nino was compared to 2015-16. (The recent El Nino is now over.)

NOAA announces their GMST tomorrow Thursday.

That Kauppinen and Malmi Paper is Junk

I am seeing lots of citations to the Kauppinen and Malmi preprint that came out two weeks ago:

"NO EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE FOR THE SIGNIFICANT ANTHROPOGENIC CLIMATE CHANGE," Kauppinen and Malmi, June 29, 2019, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.00165.pdf.

(Yes, their title is in all caps.) Anthony Watts posted it but couldn't be bothered to read it ("I didn't vet this"). Infowars has an article with no skepticism whatsoever. Someone just sent me an email saying "this journal article by some Finnish scientists would change our entire understanding of global warming."

If you even glance through the article, you see that they assumed a CO2 climate sensitivity value of just 0.24°C (top of page 4). That's an absurdly low value, given that we've already had 1°C of warming and atmospheric CO2 hasn't even increased by 50% yet. Climate models put CO2's climate sensitivity at 2-4°C.

The authors themselves justify this claim by citing three articles of their own work(!) -- one which appeared in Energy and Environment (enough said), The International Review of Physics (clearly amateurish), and another unpublished preprint. They also made the Ed Berry Bullshit Error:

If we pay attention to the fact that only a small part of the increased CO2 concentration is anthropogenic....

In fact, all the CO2 increase in the atmosphere is anthropogenic (and the part that's due to the 1°C temperature rise is also anthropogenic because that warming is anthropogenic.)

They also assume that almost all temperature change is the result of low cloud cover changes:

In Figure 2 we see the observed global temperature anomaly (red) and global low cloud cover changes (blue). These experimental observations indicate that 1 % increase of the low cloud cover fraction decreases the temperature by 0.11°C.

and assume all that cloud cover change is "natural." And so on and so on.

Deniers: Don't believe everything you read. Especially when it supports your preconceived notions. Especially when it supports denialism. Especially when you haven't even read the paper.

(Triple this when it comes from WUWT or Infowars.)

Added 7/14: The scientists at Climate Feedback came to the same conclusion, with more detail. It's worth reading.

River Gauges in New Orleans

It's hard to believe that New Orleans could be inundated again just 14 years after Hurricane Katrina and subsequent fixes. If it's as bad it's going to raise questions of "when do you give up on a city," which might be the first city to face this of what will be many more this century. Surely New Orleans as a city won't be abandoned after this flood, but you have to wonder at what point another exodus occurs and at what point that feedbacks and causes more still people to leave. It's population doesn't seem to have yet fully recovered from Katrina, so clearly there was some feedback already:

This says 2014 population was down 7.7% post-Katrina.

I found two sites which are recording the level of the Mississippi River in New Orleans, from weather.gov and the US Army Corps of Engineers. These screenshots are of the most recent results:

And here's a nice storm track.

CNN says

Much of the area around New Orleans is now 1½ to 3 meters (4.92 to 9.84 feet) below mean sea level, according to a 2003 study by the US Geological Survey. Scientists found that the ground in the area was sinking at a rate of 1 centimeter a year.

That continual sinkage, combined with rising global sea levels due to the climate crisis, meant New Orleans would probably be between 2½ and 4 meters (8.2 to 13.12 feet) below sea level by 2100.

9 ft of SLR by 2100??

Rosanna Xia wrote in the Los Angeles Times:

In the last 100 years, the sea rose less than 9 inches in California. By the end of this century, the surge could be greater than 9 feet.

Oh come on. The 21st century is almost 20% gone. There is no evidence that this scale of sea level rise is in the future.

Yes, sea level rise is accelerating. Yes, this acceleration can increase and probably is increasing. But enough to get 9 ft (2740 mm) of sea level rise in 81 years? I'm very skeptical.

Every year that doesn't see a big jump in SLR takes a bite from this century's remaining SLR budget and makes this more improbable.

Even the scientists who are studying Antarctic sea-flowing glaciers -- which definitely do seem to be a problem -- are barely sure of the order of magnitude of the SLR they'll cause.

I would like to see journalists like Rosanna Xia have some skepticism -- or any at all -- instead of writing down the most extreme upper limit that anyone mentions to them.

Pollution Controls and Economic Growth

Of course, we all know this, but it's good to see the Trump administration admit that cutting pollution is not incompatible with economic growth: 

"From 1970 to 2018, the combined emissions of the most common air pollutants fell 74 percent while the economy grew over 275 percent."

-- White House press release, 7/8/19.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trump-promoting-clean-healthy-environment-americans/

Eva Kor

This is a remarkable video of someone I found completely captivating. It speaks for itself.

Eva Kor just died at the age of 85.

I Am Now Too Old to Use the Internet

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Trump is Behind Obama in Job Gains

Job gains during Trump's first 28 months: 5.61 M.

During Obama's last 28 months: 6.42 M.

Sources:
FRED USPRIV, FRED USGOVT

Medium: “‘Climategate’ Email Hacking was Carried out from Russia, in Effort to Undermine Action…”

This is interesting, but it's not really a surprise that shadowy Russians/Eastern Europeans would be the hackers. I hope the journalist, Iggy Ostanin, can eventually publish the name of the climate scientist he says in involved.

Exclusive: "Climategate" Email Hacking was Carried out from Russia, in Effort to Undermine Action… by Iggy Ostanin

Russian hacking, quote-unquote, seems to be more and more of a problem anymore. Is there really nothing that can be done?

US Coal Production Since 2002

As we've been discussing US coal production under Trump, here's the larger picture, since 2002. (Same source.)

Trump Not Increasing US Coal Production

US coal production under Trump:

More #AbiSciCon19

Here's my second article for Physics World on the Astrobiology Science Conference 2019 in Bellevue:

"How to look for signs of life on a planet 40 light-years away," 26 Jun 2019, Physics World. 

AbSciCon 2019

I'm at the 2019 Astrobiology science conference in Bellevue, Washington. I wrote about my first day and a half here for Physics World's blog.

Did you know there are now over 4,000 exoplanets discovered? That there's a portable genome sequencer that weighs 85 grams and fits in the palm of your hand? That 4% of the makeup of Omaha Beach consists of shrapnel?

Wrap-up of Today's Oregon Climate Craziness

End of the day wrap-up on actions surrounding Oregon's cap-and-trade bill, HB 2020.

The Oregon Republican senators are still hiding. The state police seem to be still out looking for them, though I don't know the degree of their vigor. They have been put in a very unfortunate and awkward position.

The Senate R's could not legally accept the GoFundMe money. How about they give it to baby immigrants stuck in a border jail cell? No? Thought not.... But the R's do have a PAC! Because you know there was surely someway to make money out of this somehow.

No shooting yet, but the Oregon Republicans did say they reject the support of right wing militias such as the Three Presenters Militia, who pledged to come to their aid. You'd have to call that a net positive. (Seems that to argue for gun rights, or to be a patriot of the highest order, you have to be against related to climate change.) (I guess I'll never be a 3%er.)

Time, and CO2 emissions, march on.

--

I'm taking time off. Maybe the whole summer.

Oregon Senator Tries Blaming the World's Poor

Naturally one of Oregon's state senators presented this argument:

After numerous unsuccessful attempts to kill the bill on Monday, House Republican leader Carl Wilson (R-Grants Pass) said in a statement, "Climate change is a global problem, not an Oregon problem. Oregon's workers should not be punished for the reckless environmental policies of China and India."

This is a desperate argument, and I think somewhat cowardly, because it seeks to put the blame on the poor of the world, and it arrogantly assumes that Americans have an inherent right to emit more carbon pollution than citizens of another country.

I've probably written about this before, but here are the numbers:

These numbers come from the World Resource Institute's CAIT database, which goes to 2014, and the BP annual reports for 2015-2017. And the data are for energy use only, no changes in land use or other greenhouse gases like methane.)

How can anyone look at those numbers and claim the problem is really China and India??

Of course climate change is a global problem. And the solution is for everyone to solve their share of the problem. Some here in Oregon have expressed concern this will drive industries outside the state to where there are no cap-and-trade limits. (Idaho seems to be the preferred choice.) Has that happened elsewhere? Oregon already has one of the lowest state corporate tax rates of any state (7th lowest). They're going to give that up, just because of CnT? 

Maybe we should divide the troposphere up into N blocks, where N is the world population, and let every person on Earth sell credits to allow CO2 pollution in their block. People could sell their credits to brokers who then trade a large number of blocks. It's reduce emissions and be a poverty relief program as well.

Oregon Fines and a GoFundMe Page

Oregon senators face a $500/day fine for not showing up to do their jobs. Naturally (these days) there is a GoFundMe page to help them out, currently up to $19,375 after one day. 11 senators need to stay away to prevent a quorum, so that's $5,500/day, with the fund already covers at least three days. I'll be surprised if, once the word on the page gets out nationally, there isn't enough to cover the entire time they'd need to be out of state, which goes to the end of the legislative session on June 30th. Though the governor is threatening to call a special session to start July 2.

The Climate Kerfuffle in Oregon

Big troubles in Oregon over the cap-and-trade bill in the Senate. Senate Republicans have fled the state to prevent a senate quorum. There's trouble busin' in from outta state, and the D.A. here can't get no relief. There are rumors of a rumble out on the promenade, and the gamblin' commission's hangin' on by the skin of its teeth.

OK. It's true that enough Senate Republicans have fled the state, mostly to Idaho I read, to prevent a quorum in the Senate so there can be no vote on HB 2020, a cap-and-trade bill. The 2019 legislative sessions ends on June 30th, and they're trying to hide that out.

But Oregon's constitution allows the governor to call on the state police to roost them out and bodily bring them back to the state capital, which she has now done. As if that's not bad enough, one state senator is threatening to shoot them if they show up, saying they should be "single and well-armed."

I see two major issues behind all this. One is the unwillingness of Republicans to do anything about climate change. But the second issue is more in play at the moment: the strange political makeup of Oregon.

Oregon is the 9th largest state in the union, and it really should be broken up into two states, divided roughly by the Cascade mountains. Portland is (generalizing) very liberal and backs liberal causes like cap-and-trade. And the county it's in, Multnomah, has about 20% of the state's population. The Portland metropolitan area has over 65% the state's population, though that includes Vancouver, Washington and other nearby towns across the Columbia River. The Willamette Valley, entirely in Oregon, contains about 70% of the state population.

So Portland is the state behemoth. As a result, Democrats have a 3/5ths supermajority in the state legislature and senate, and the governor is a Democrat. So even though the vast majority of the area of the state is red, the blues have a large upper hand. The figure to the right shows the results of the 2018 gubernatorial race, by county, won by Kate Brown, the Democrat.

The state even divides up geographically, with the Williamette Valley being lush terrain from all the rain, and the east, in the Cascade mountain rain shadow, being brown and scrubby high desert.

East of the Cascades and south of Eugene -- so, anywhere outside the Willamette Valley -- is very conservative. But with the supermajority they feel Democrats are ramming through legislation. Which they are. If the situation were reversed, Republicans would, of course, be doing exactly same thing.

So you can see the need for the state to be divided into two, or there will be perpetual political unhappiness on the right. The Democrats have been in power here for decades, and that doesn't look to be changing anytime soon, and maybe never.

Republicans say the cap-and-trade bill is unfair, in part because rural people drive more, with all the farmers and long distances between towns. The cap-and-trade bill is estimated to increase the price of gasoline by up to $0.23/gallon, which works out to $25 per metric ton of CO2. Not a lot. The carbon cap would periodically be lowered as time goes on.

Well, if you drive more and emit more carbon, you should, in fairness, pay more. But of course a lot of people don't want to hear it's time to start paying for their pollution.

I suspect the cap-and-trade bill here will pass in some form, perhaps by giving tax credits to farms and businesses in the red counties (or even statewide), or other legislative goodies. It's already a long and complex bill -- a simple carbon tax being obviously too simple (and, moreso, transparent).

Hopefully no state troopers will be shot. (They have guns of their own, you know.)

The Dead Leaf Butterfly

The Dead Leaf Butterfly

The other day a couple of religious canvassers came to my door. I forget what they said initially, but I gave my standard answer, "thanks, but I'm an atheist."

This usually sends them away, but not always, and this pair was an exception. She asked why I took that position. "No evidence," I said.

She said she recently saw a documentary with a butterfly that looked like a leaf. How could that have happened by itself, without being designed?

"Evolution by natural selection," I said.

What about this house, she said, pointing around her. Who designed it?

An architect, I said. Then I excused myself, said good luck on your efforts, but I was busy and had to go.

I wasn't really that busy, but afterward I thought that the butterfly in the shape of a leaf is about the best example of evolution by natural selection that is out there. I mean, it's perfect.

No, Greener is Not Better

Just found this article by Carl Zimmer, who is always worth reading, but especially in this case:

"‘Global Greening’ Sounds Good. In the Long Run, It’s Terrible: Rising carbon dioxide levels are making the world greener. But that’s nothing to celebrate."
- Carl Zimmer, NY Times, July 30, 2018

Playing a Chernobyl Game

This article published yesterday in the Daily Beast, by Clive Irving, is in MHO excellent and well-worth reading, especially if you watched the Chernobyl series on HBO, especially the last episode:

"Our Own Chernobyl Is Coming. And We’re Handling It Just Like 
the Soviets: The Trump war on science is carried out with 
the same communist techniques that make the HBO drama 
so chilling. This time the whole planet is at risk," Clive Irving,
Daily Beast, Published 06.14.19 11:10PM ET

Irving is right. The outright denial by liars in the Administration, from the very top (POTUS) down, who lack any capacity to even begin to engage with the scientific argument. Trump himself is so clueless that he thinks this is only about traditional air pollution and traditional water pollution. I don't think he's lying about this -- he just doesn't have the foggiest idea what climate change is about, just like he does not know what trade deficits are about.

It is no longer believable that the next decade won't be 0.2°C (0.3&deg;F) warmer than this decade just ended, which was by that amount warmer than the one before it, and that warmer than one earlier.

9/11

I can easily see this photograph representing 9/11 in a history book 100 years from now.
--

9/11/2001

China Has Twice the Environmental Taxes cp the US

This chart is from an interesting research document from the OECD, China's Progress Towards Green Growth: An International Perspective, October 2018. It shows that China has about twice the environmental taxes than does the US:

Personally I am very tired of claims that I see again and again that it's China and India who should be cutting back their use of fossil fuels, since they're the largest emitters.

First of all, the US emitted 2.2 times as much as does India in 2017, according to the 2018 BP report. Cumulatively, since 1850, the US has emitted 7.7 times what India has. So the India part of the assertion is just a dumb argument.

Cumulatively (since 1850), the US has emitted about 1.9 times more CO2 than has China, which I calculated from the World Resource Institute's CAIT database and the 2016-2018 BP reports.

And, I calculate that in 2017 the US emitted about 2.3 times that of China on a per capita basis.

The US has mucked up the atmosphere far more than China has, and continues to do so on an individual basis. It's not like an American newborn has an inherent, god-given right to emit twice as much CO2 as does a Chinese newborn.

The US is still the world's primary energy hog, and the US should be leading the fight to get rid of fossil fuels. Instead the Administration is going in the opposite direction, the future climate be damned.

1988: Climate Change VP Debate Question

In 1988 a question on climate change was presented to Dan Quayle and Lloyd Benson at their vice-presidential debate, by a smart reporter, Jon Margolis:


Lloyd Benson (a Democrat from Texas, no less) shows he has at least some handle on the question, suggesting a transition to natural gas. Dan Quayle (Republican) comes off as clueless, which was his trademark, providing the most generic, meaningless answer possible, all in that dullard countenance he was known for.

Of course, later in that debate Benson put Quayle to the canvas in perhaps the most famous debate response in US history:


Alas, Bush Sr and Quayle won the election. Then introduced the idea of cap-and-trade.

What the Hell? (Solar Luminosity)

I found the following graph on Wikipedia, when I looked up solar luminosity.

It shows that solar luminosity was significantly lower in the past, which counters the denier argument that "well if CO2 was 6000 ppm back then, why wasn't there immense warming?") But I do not understand this graph. Why is temperature so constant? The Sun is the perfect example of a blackbody -- it absorbs all radiation incident upon it. (And everything else, too.) So why doesn't it follow the Stefan-Boltzmann law, where

luminosity = sigma*T⁴ ?

I'm confused. Can anyone help me?

River of Melted Permafrost

Not something you see every day -- a river of melted permafrost:

Michael Mann Wins a Court Case

Michael Mann and the The Frontier Centre for Public Policy Inc. have settled their case in the Canadian Supreme Court, with the Frontier Centre issuing a retraction & apology:

Mann sued Tim Ball and the Frontier Centre for libel. From Forbes 2012, where Larry Bell predicted the wrong outcome:

The first law suit was filed against Canadian climate scientist Timothy Ball who humorously commented  in an interview published by the Frontier Center for Public Policy, a Winnipeg think tank, that Penn State researcher Mann should, instead, be in the state pen.

Mann says he has not settled his claims against Tim Ball, who remains a defendant in the lawsuit. We'll see about that "humor."

--
Tim Ball's scientific reputation has already been shredded in a Canadian court, as it's been admitted in a court of law that he is not a climate science expert.

After the Calgary Herald published an op-ed by Ball on April 19, 2006, whom the newspaper identified as the first climatology PhD in Canada and a climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg for 28 years, they published a letter on April 23, 2006 from Dr. Dan Johnson, a professor at the University of Lethbridge, who pointed out that neither of those descriptions is true; that Dr. Ball's credentials were being seriously overstated. Ball later threatened Johnson and the Herald and ultimately sued for defamation.

In their Statement of Defense filed in Court, the Calgary Herald submitted the following:

1. "...that the Plaintiff (Ball) never held a reputation in the scientific community as a noted climatologist and authority on global warming.

2. "The Plaintiff has never published any research in any peer-reviewed scientific journal which addressed the topic of human contributions to greenhouse gas emissions and global warming

3. "The Plaintiff has published no papers on climatology in academically recognized peer-reviewed scientific journals since his retirement as a Professor in 1996;

4. "The Plaintiff's credentials and credibility as an expert on the issue of global warming have been repeatedly disparaged in the media; and

5. "The Plaintiff is viewed as a paid promoter of the agenda of the oil and gas industry rather than as a practicing scientist."

Ball dropped his lawsuit.....

Source: The Calgary Herald, Statement of Defense – paragraph 50, Dr Tim Ball v The Calgary Herald, In the Court of the Queen’s Bench of Alberta Judicial District of Calgary, Dec 7, 2006 (http://is.gd/brO4uO).

More at:
http://www.desmogblog.com/tim-ball-vs-dan-johnson-update-0
http://www.desmogblog.com/tim-ball-vs-dan-johnson-lawsuit-documents
http://www.desmogblog.com/ball-bails-on-johnson-lawsuit

Wind Power Now Surpassing Coal Power

From Quartz, about a month ago:

In March 2019, renewables generated more electricity than
coal for the first time in US history.

Quartz gives the chart below, but it clearly has problems, because a megawatt/day is not a unit of energy. Perhaps they meant megawatt-days. And renewables only out-generate coal in the projected part of their graph, not in March 2019, when it actually does. And they only show four data points a year, when they're writing about an individual month. Sloppy.

Not only this, but wind turbine technician is now the fastest growing occupation in the US, a job that pays a median of $51,000/yr. Wind generated about 5.5% of electricity in 2016. The wind industry employs over 100,000 people; solar about 260,000. The number of coal miners is now about 53,000.

By the way, the EIA's Electricity Monthly Update front page gives no mention to renewables at all. It's like they don't even exist. Or like they don't want them to exist.

Ladybugs On the Move

Too good not to blog:

The @NWSSanDiego reports that the large echo showing up on radar in Southern California last night was actually a cloud of ladybugs about 80 miles by 80 miles in size flying at between 5,000 and 9,000 feet: https://t.co/0tZQryBR1v pic.twitter.com/qiMKcDd3Pe

— Shah Selbe (@shahselbe) June 5, 2019

Jobs By Energy Source

Here's a little chart I whipped up for the number of US jobs per unit energy for the major types of energy source*:

PJ = petajoule = 10¹⁵ joules (J)
EJ = exajoule = 10¹⁸ joules (J)
M = mega, B = billion, kWh = kilowatt-hour
pv = photovoltaic, h&c = heating and cooling

*Numbers in blue are data I looked up, numbers in black are calculated.

This isn't just for electricity, but all primary energy production. Of course, for solar and wind and coal it's almost all electricity, except for the occasional coal-powered vehicle. I did that calculation too; it's the last column in the chart.

There's a lot to quibble with here -- this is down and dirty. I'm not a professional analyst getting paid to do this perfectly. Most of concern to me is that I'm not sure "oil and gas extraction" includes any related management jobs, like in corporate headquarters. Same for coal. (And, for that matter, solar and wind.) It doesn't include the jobs in coal powered electricity plants (or solar plants). But the differences in jobs per energy are so large -- by one order of magnitude for wind, and two orders of magnitude for solar -- that one would have to do a whole lot of quibbling to make a difference in the conclusion that there are many more jobs in renewable energies than in fossil fuels, per unit of energy generated. (Why is this?)

And remember, despite the larger number of jobs, solar and wind power are now cheaper than coal in 3/4ths of the country.

Sources, jobs:
Renewable energy and jobs, Annual Review, IRENA
FRED for oil and gas and coal mining jobs

Source, energy:
EIA Energy Overview, Table 1.2

"Climate Denier" Is In the Dictionary

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/climate%20change%20denier

How About This for Calculating the 1-year Moving Average?

Update 6/10: A commenter got me thinking about this more, and I'm convinced now that there is no problem using the 365-day moving average for the 1-year moving average. See the comments for more explanation. Thanks Victor!

So I've been thinking more about how to calculate the 1-year moving average (MA) of daily data, which is complicated by leap years, which over several decades can leave you astray by several days, which affects the value of the 1-yr MA. (About 10 days over 4 decades, a third of a month.)

Any opinions on this proposal?

To me this seems the least arbitrary of anything I've seen so far. Thoughts?

Wind Turbines Cause Jobs, Not Cancer

"Now we have a president who claims that wind turbines cause cancer. He's wrong -- they cause jobs."

- Jay Inslee, today on NPR (National Public Radio)

Top Ten Theoretical Physicists of 20th Century?

After my post yesterday on Murray Gell-Mann, I started thinking about who are the top ten theoretical physicists of the 20th century. I've seen lists, but I wanted to come up with my own list without consulting them. Here is mine, in rough chronological order:

Albert Einstein

Werner Heisenberg

Paul Dirac

Richard Feynman

Murray Gell Mann

Chen Ning Yang

Steven Weinberg

Gerard 't Hooft

Kip Thorne

Edward Witten

People that almost made my list are, again in rough chronology order:

Emmy Noether

Niels Bohr

Wolfgang Pauli

Max Planck

Hans Bethe

Julian Schwinger

Sheldon Glashow

Stephen Hawking
Added 6/3: Erwin Schrodinger

I made this list based on accomplishments. Stephen Hawking would probably be first if it was due to accomplishments-despite-obstacles. (Well, second. No one can possibly best Einstein.)

Do you think I missed anyone or misplaced someone?

Murray Gell-Mann, RIP

Murray Gell-Mann

Murray Gell-Mann died on the 24th. He was a giant among physicists, and won the Nobel Prize in 1969. Sean Carroll has a very nice article about him in the New York Times.

One thing I never knew was that Gell-Mann came up with the sound "kwork" before he saw "quark" in Finnegans Wake, in the now famous line

"Three quarks for Muster Mark!"

Gell-Mann was lucky to be in his prime when experimental and theoretical physics was in chaos, because of all the elementary particles being discovered in the '60s that seemed to have no rhyme or reason. And he took full advantage of that luck. Gell-Mann tamed the "particle zoo" with his "Eightfold Way" classifications, which even predicted new particles that were then found. And he didn't do it via big calculations, but by being especially creative and insightful. It was about as... joyful as physics gets. It was by no means all that Gell-Mann did, as Carroll writes.

Gell-Mann is probably among the top ten theoretical physicists of the 20th century. More people should know his name.

The meson octet of the Eightfold Way

Things I Have Noticed Today

The Energy Department called LNG "freedom gas" in a press release. Orwell smiles, while pinching himself to see if he is real. He isn't, but his ideas certainly are. CNN. The Guardian.

Al Franken refers to Michael Mann “the Meryl Streep of climatologists.”

Mueller: 'If we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so'.

Germany proposes to give up coal...by 2038. Not helpful. The link has a graph of their electricity generation mixture. Coal is slowly declining, but still rules.

"Why natural cycles only play small role in rate of global warming," Karsten Haustein et al, CarbonBrief, 5/24/19.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-natural-cycles-only-play-small-role-in-rate-of-global-warming

Cato closes its climate shop; Pat Michaels is out.

The move came after Pat Michaels, a climate scientist who rejects mainstream researchers' concerns about rising temperatures, left Cato earlier this year amid disagreements with officials in the organization.

"They informed me that they didn't think their vision of a think tank was in the science business, and so I said, 'OK, bye,'" Michaels said in an interview yesterday. "There had been some controversy going around the building for some time, so things got to a situation where they didn't work out...."

Cato also is no longer affiliated with Richard Lindzen, an emeritus professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has long been critical of established climate science. Lindzen was a distinguished fellow at the think tank.

Finally:

Prediction of the future from 1982 by @exxonmobil , along with data showing how it has actually evolved. Exxon's predictions were extremely accurate. #ExxonKnew @GeoffreySupran @NaomiOreskes pic.twitter.com/Syf8AR6XXJ

— Andrew Dessler (@AndrewDessler) May 14, 2019

Ice on Fire, Trailer

Here's the latest climate film from Leonardo DiCaprio et al, Ice on Fire.


I don't know. I don't want to be pessimistic just for the sake of being a devil's advocate (or worse), which I can be prone to do. There is clearly good stuff in this film.

I don't agree that methane is such a big problem -- it's radiative forcing is only 1/4th that of CO2's -- it just seems easier to focus on than CO2.

And I don't see that carbon sequestration is anywhere near economical enough to make sense doing.

So I guess I don't see solutions as at hand as this film -- at least the trailer -- is trying to imply.

Global Sea Ice Extent Still Pushing Record Lows

Here is global sea ice extent's year-to-date average as of May 25th:

Sorry about the blurry picture. It's due to the way Google portrays figures & pictures on blogger. I haven't found a fix, and I doubt they care enough about blogger anymore to do something about this.

Global_sea_ice_extent(t) = Arctic_sea_ice_extent(t) + Antarctic_sea_ice_ extent(t)

Climate Deniers Who Usurp the Tragedy of the Holocaust

I don't have a problem using the word "denier" to describe those who deny the science physics. But Eli Rabett has hit on the best response to their whinging that they're being compared to Holocaust deniers (when they aren't; the word "denier" had a perfectly appropriate definition before the Holocaust ever happened).

You can read his blog post, but it's worth producing the string of tweets, which make his argument clearly and succinctly:

oh. OK. So it's OK to use word 'denier' and smear link them to Holocaust as long as your specific enclave is not labeled the same.

— Marc Morano (@ClimateDepot) May 24, 2019

Why are you stealing the sacrifice of those who died in the Holocaust?

— eli rabett (@EthonRaptor) May 24, 2019

oh. OK. So it's OK to use word 'denier' and smear link them to Holocaust as long as your specific enclave is not labeled the same.

— Marc Morano (@ClimateDepot) May 24, 2019

You use the sacrifice of others to deflect criticism of your duplicity

— eli rabett (@EthonRaptor) May 24, 2019

Game, set and match.

Eli summarizes:

So here are Eli's suggestions the next time some anti-Vaxxer, climate change denier or whatever starts bleating about being accused of denying the Holocaust and how mean you are for pointing it out

• Why are you stealing the sacrifice of those who died in the Holocaust? 

• You use the sacrifice of others to deflect criticism of your duplicity 

• Another bunch who wants to steal the suffering of the Holocaust victims for themselves. 

West Virginia's Economic Crisis

Median household income has declined 9% since its peak, and unlike the US as a whole, is not recovering.

 

Added: Here are two more indicators about West Virginia mining dollars, which looked to be on the upswing in the last couple of years:

 

Pig's Face

I found this photo a while ago, and it's been sitting on my hard drive awaiting something.

I find the face of the pig on the right to be very intelligent (I guess) and definitely haunting. He seems knowing, and miserable, fully aware of his plight.

I eat meat. I've tried being a vegetarian, but after I few months I feel somewhat anemic, or at least low on energy. I think. It could well be psychosomatic, for all I know -- I wouldn't be surprised. The longest I've gone is four months. But in the last year or two I'm trying, imperfectly, not to eat pork, because they seem too intelligent, too aware. I hardly eat beef, too, because of the red meat thing. So mostly I eat chicken. Some fish and shrimp.

When I was a kid, maybe 10-11 years old, one evening my dad took me to a neighbors a few miles up the road. (Where I grew up, houses were far apart and you'd know you neighbors a mile or two in every direction.) The evening's task was to butcher a pig. They took one out back and shot it -- they didn't let me watch that. But after some draining they brought the carcass in and started cutting it up. My job was to take certain pieces and run them through a grinder to produce ground pork. I did it without complaining, or thinking twice about it, really. I was included. People just did this, as far as I knew. We ate a lot of butchered animals then. Every so often my grandfather would drive a couple of his steers down across the border into Maryland, tied in the back of his pickup, taking me and a cousin or two, and back his truck into a plant where they'd kill the cows and butcher them. After two hours or three, we'd back up again to the plant and they'd load big buckets of meat into the back of my pap's pickup. Then we'd drive the hour or so home, and spend the night wrapping up meat. My job was usually to label the packages taped in white paper with a black magic marker, because I could make the best block lettering. They'd go in the freezer. My grandparents took half the cow, and my parents would buy the other half. This was our meat for the winter. (We never ever went to a restaurant to eat. The first time ever I think was a Pizza Hut the day of my high school commencement.) It was almost always beef. I don't remember much pork, except that one time I was the grinder, and the chickens on my grandparent's gentleman's farm were just for eggs. Occasionally there was venison (never from my gun; I only went deer hunting once, and it was a disastrous experience that maybe I'll tell another time), and even once some black bear my grandparents got from someone, which tasted sweet and better than you might think.

Still, eating pork bothers me and I'm trying to cut back and refrain.

Some Numbers on US Health Care Costs

Once a month I try to look at the data on national health care expenditures from the Altarum Institute, who keep track of these things.

There might be a bit of progress relative to Gross Domestic Product.

The fuzziness of the graphs and figure I post -- not as apparent at the largest size offered, but otherwise it is -- is due to Google reformatting them after they're uploaded to Blogger,, to a lower resolution. Not much I can do about that, as far as I know. Google doesn't seem very interested in improving Blogger, or even maintaining it. But transitioning to another platform at this point, after about 13 or so years of blogging here, seems like it would be a nightmare.

(Maybe blogs are on their way out anyway?)

USA48 Annualized Precipitation at a Record High

Something I didn't realize until I read it on Twitter is that average precipitation for the continental US over the last 12 months is at a record high:

How Much Had It Warmed by the 1940s?

Since some of you are discussing natural vs manmade warming in the comments, I whipped up this little chart that shows how much warming has occurred, when.

Click to enlarge

Blue dots are the decadal averages, and red dots are the cumulative sum of the decadal changes -- how a decade compares to the decade before it.

So about 30% of today's warming of almost 1°C happened by the 1940s, and, after a little cooling until the 1970s, about 80% of overall warming has happened since then.

What caused the warming before the '40s? I've actually asked a scientist or two about this over the years, and the answer I've gotten is

1. some increase in solar irradiance from about 1910-1940
2. greenhouse gases, especially CO2
3. reversing of ice-albedo feedback initially caused by volcanic aerosols, which together caused the Little Ice Age

The increase in solar irradiance was maybe 1 W/m², which is good for about 0.1°C of warming.

By 1945 atmospheric CO2 was about 310 ppm, compared to 1850's 285 ppm, which gives a forcing of about 0.45 W/m². (Compared to today's value of about 2 W/m². Remember, logarithms change fastest in the beginning.) If climate sensitivity is 3°C, that'd be a warming of about 0.35°C. But I should probably use the transient climate response here, which is the temperature change at the time of CO2 doubling, i.e. without the long-term feedbacks. If it's 1.5°C, that's a warming of about 0.15-0.2°C.

I don't know about the ice-albedo feedback, but anyway it's a feedback not a forcing. But it would have caused some warming.

So it's likely that 90% or more of warming-to-date is from man. This is at a time when, now, the climate should be naturally cooling, due to a slight decline in solar irradiance since the 1950s, and some slight Milankovitch cooling. (I don't have a numerical handle on the latter, but the cycles change so slowly (fastest is 40,000 years) it's gotta be tiny.) This is why some scientists I see say man is responsible for 110% of warming since 1850.

Does this sound about right?

Anomalies from GISS Are Looking Large

Today NASA GISS published their temperature measurements for April. I've been following them for a long time, and lately every month now I'm struck by how high they're getting. A temperature 1°C above the 1951-1980 baseline used to be almost unthinkable. Now they're showing up more and more. The land anomalies are lately about 1.3°C -- that's 2.3°F! -- since, basically, 1965 (average of the baseline limits). And there's no sign of the warming stopping.

Yes, temperatures are up because we're currently in an El Nino. Roy Spencer thinks half of all warming last century was due to El Ninos, even though the average MEI over that period is -0.03, which is just a tad La Nina-ish.