Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Trump Puts US Allies, IS Group on Notice

FAIL: Busted Wind Turbines Give College Whopping Negative 99.14% Return On Investment | Watts Up With That?

FAIL: Busted Wind Turbines Give College Whopping Negative 99.14% Return On Investment 

FAIL: Busted Wind Turbines Give College Whopping Negative 99.14% Return On Investment

From the “it’s OK, we used other people’s money” department and Andrew Follet at The Daily Caller:
Two wind turbines on the Lake Land College Campus in Mattoon, IL Image: Google Earth
Two wind turbines on the Lake Land College Campus in Mattoon, IL Image: Google Earth
Lake Land College recently announced plans to tear down broken wind turbines on campus, after the school got $987,697.20 in taxpayer support for wind power.
The turbines were funded by a $2.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor, but the turbines lasted for less than four years and were incredibly costly to maintain.
“Since the installation in 2012, the college has spent $240,000 in parts and labor to maintain the turbines,” Kelly Allee, Director of Public Relations at Lake Land College, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
The college estimates it would take another $100,000 in repairs to make the turbines function again after one of them was struck by lightning and likely suffered electrical damage last summer. School officials’ original estimates found the turbine would save it $44,000 in electricity annually, far more than the $8,500 they actually generated. Under the original optimistic scenario, the turbines would have to last for 22.5 years just to recoup the costs, not accounting for inflation. If viewed as an investment, the turbines had a return of negative 99.14 percent.
“While they have been an excellent teaching tool for students, they have only generated $8,500 in power in their lifetime,” she said. “One of the reasons for the lower than expected energy power is that the turbines often need to be repaired. They are not a good teaching tool if they are not working.”
The college estimates it would take another $100,000 in repairs to make the turbines function again after one of them was struck by lightning and likely suffered electrical damage last summer.
Even though the college wants to tear down one of the turbines, they are federal assets and “there is a process that has to be followed” according to Allee.
The turbines became operational in 2012 after a 5-year long building campaign intended to reduce the college’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to fight global warming. Even though the turbines cost almost $1 million, but the college repeatedly claimed they’d save money in the long run.
“It is becoming more and more difficult for us financially to maintain the turbines,” Josh Bullock, the college’s president, told the Journal Gazette and Times-Courier last week. “I think it was an extremely worthy experiment when they were installed, but they just have not performed to our expectations to this point.”
Bullock states that the turbines simply haven’t been able to power the campus’ buildings and that most of the electricity wasn’t effectively used.
Lake Land plans to replace the two failed turbines with a solar power system paid for by a government grant. “[T]he photovoltaic panels are expected to save the college between $50,000 and $60,000 this year,”Allee told the DCNF.
Globally, less than 30 percent of total power wind capacity is actually utilized as the intermittent and irregular nature of wind power makes it hard to use.Power demand is relatively predictable, but the output of a wind turbine is quite variable over time and generally doesn’t coincide with the times when power is most needed. Thus, wind power systems require conventional backups to provide power during outages. Since the output of wind turbines cannot be predicted with high accuracy by forecasts, grid operators need to keep excess conventional power systems running.
Wind power accounted for only 4.4 percent of electricity generated in America in 2014, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Edgar County Watchdog adds:

Lake Land College (LLC) wind turbine history can be seen here:
2007-2010 COST BREAKDOWN:
2007:  Wind feasibility study completed for $30,000
2010:  LLC provided $500,000 from Illinois DCEO to “build one turbine.”
2010:  LLC provided 18% of $2,542,762 from US Dept of Labor for “green job training program and related equipment including a 100 kW turbine.”  (The turbine portion of this US DoL grant calculates to $457,697.20 per the small print details.)
WHAT DO WE HAVE TO SHOW FOR TAXPAYER $987,697.20 spent to build these boondoggles?https://www.lakelandcollege.edu/as/tec/sustain/documents/Sustainability%20Media%20Guide%202012.pdf
Operation date: 2012
http://jg-tc.com/news/lake-land-wind-turbines-are-up-running/article_c011d95a-0f6b-11e2-9f3a-0019bb2963f4.html
(read the comments from “gringa”in 2012……totally good point about it never paying for themselves)
No mention of payback periods in this article. Seems like LLC would include the economic effectiveness of this investment in any discussion of it. After all, isn’t this all about return on investment? Maybe not. Wind is free, but the land and equipment and maintenance to that equipment is NOT free.
in 2014, another article was written touting the “savings”:
http://jg-tc.com/news/lake-land-college-saves-with-green-energy/article_e9f30825-81cb-5f7c-b3c7-f4fa0e7673e4.html
LLC should update their college website “infomercial” found here since the turbines no longer (if ever) actually saved $44,000 per year per the over-optimistic claims:
https://www.lakeland.cc.il.us/as/tec/green_jobs/documents/EAR%20INSERT%20LLC%20May%202013.pdf
Just for fun, IF the turbines saved $44,000 per year, these two junkers would have to last 22.5 years, but they only lasted a shameful FOUR YEARS!!!!!

The Lake Land College Newsletter was full of praise in 2012:
Wind Turbine at LLC
Source: Laker Low Down eNewsletter published January 26, 2012
Despite the bad weather, the first of the college’s two 100 kW wind turbines has been installed. This project is made possible by American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding via the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity and a Community-Based Job Training Grant from the U. S. Department of Labor.
The new turbines will offer students advanced training for large-scale turbine maintenance and energy production. They will also power buildings on campus with alternative energy, further reducing the cost of utilities for Lake Land College. Because Lake Land College officials and experts worked with the manufacturer to create customized turbines, it is projected that there will be a significant return on this investment of Class Two wind speeds, making these turbines a very affordable option for the college.
The two turbines are estimated to produce more than 220,000 kilowatt hours each year, thereby reducing the number of kilowatt hours of electricity needed by 440,000. The college estimates that the initial energy savings will be around $44,000 annually.
What exactly does this mean? Here’s a real-world example: the average Illinois home consumes 1,100 kilowatt hours each month. The two turbines should produce 36,667 kilowatt hours each month. Based on this information, the two turbines could produce enough energy to power the average Illinois home for just over 33 months, or 2.8 years!

Rise in CO2 has 'greened Planet Earth'

Rise in CO2 has 'greened Planet Earth' 

Rise in CO2 has 'greened Planet Earth'

  • 25 April 2016

Carbon dioxide emissions from industrial society have driven a huge growth in trees and other plants.
A new study says that if the extra green leaves prompted by rising CO2 levels were laid in a carpet, it would cover twice the continental USA.
Climate sceptics argue the findings show that the extra CO2 is actually benefiting the planet.
But the researchers say the fertilisation effect diminishes over time.
They warn the positives of CO2 are likely to be outweighed by the negatives.
The lead author, Prof Ranga Myneni from Boston University, told BBC News the extra tree growth would not compensate for global warming, rising sea levels, melting glaciers, ocean acidification, the loss of Arctic sea ice, and the prediction of more severe tropical storms.
The new study is published in the journal Nature Climate Change by a team of 32 authors from 24 institutions in eight countries.
It is called Greening of the Earth and its Drivers, and it is based on data from the Modis and AVHRR instruments which have been carried on American satellites over the past 33 years.The sensors show significant greening of something between 25% and 50% of the Earth's vegetated land, which in turn is slowing the pace of climate change as the plants are drawing CO2 from the atmosphere.
Just 4% of vegetated land has suffered from plant loss.

The extra growth is the equivalent of more than four billion giant sequoias – the biggest trees on Earth
This is in line with the Gaia thesis promoted by the maverick scientist James Lovelock who proposed that the atmosphere, rocks, seas and plants work together as a self-regulating organism. Mainstream science calls such mechanisms "feedbacks".
The scientists say several factors play a part in the plant boom, including climate change (8%), more nitrogen in the environment (9%), and shifts in land management (4%).
But the main factor, they say, is plants using extra CO2 from human society to fertilise their growth (70%).
Harnessing energy from the sun, green leaves grow by using CO2, water, and nutrients from soil.
"The greening reported in this study has the ability to fundamentally change the cycling of water and carbon in the climate system," said a lead author Dr Zaichun Zhu, from Peking University, Beijing, China.
The authors note that the beneficial aspect of CO2 fertilisation have previously been cited by contrarians to argue that carbon emissions need not be reduced.
Co-author Dr Philippe Ciais, from the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences in Gif-sur‑Yvette, France (also an IPCC author), said: "The fallacy of the contrarian argument is two-fold. First, the many negative aspects of climate change are not acknowledged.
"Second, studies have shown that plants acclimatise to rising CO2 concentration and the fertilisation effect diminishes over time." Future growth is also limited by other factors, such as lack of water or nutrients.



A co-author Prof Pierre Friedlingstein, from Exeter University, UK, told BBC News that carbon uptake from plants was factored into Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) models, but was one of the main sources of uncertainty in future climate forecasts.
Warming the Earth releases CO2 by increasing decomposition of soil organic matter, thawing of permafrost, drying of soils, and reduced photosynthesis - potentially leading to tropical vegetation dieback.
He said: "Carbon sinks (such as forests, where carbon is stored) would become sources if carbon loss from warming becomes larger than carbon gain from fertilisation.
"But we can't be certain yet when that would happen. Hopefully, the world will follow the Paris agreement objectives and limit warming below 2C."
Nic Lewis, an independent scientist often critical of the IPCC, told BBC News: "The magnitude of the increase in vegetation appears to be considerably larger than suggested by previous studies.
"This suggests that projected atmospheric CO2 levels in IPCC scenarios are significantly too high, which implies that global temperature rises projected by IPCC models are also too high, even if the climate is as sensitive to CO2 increases as the models imply."
And Prof Judith Curry, the former chair of Earth and atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, added: "It is inappropriate to dismiss the arguments of the so-called contrarians, since their disagreement with the consensus reflects conflicts of values and a preference for the empirical (i.e. what has been observed) versus the hypothetical (i.e. what is projected from climate models).
"These disagreements are at the heart of the public debate on climate change, and these issues should be debated, not dismissed."

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

The Horrors of Hiroshima in Context

The Horrors of Hiroshima in Context 

The Horrors of Hiroshima in Context

Victor Davis Hanson
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Posted: Apr 21, 2016 12:01 AM
The Horrors of Hiroshima in Context
The dropping of two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 remains the only wartime use of nuclear weapons in history.
No one knows exactly how many Japanese citizens were killed by the two American bombs. A macabre guess is around 140,000. The atomic attacks finally shocked Emperor Hirohito and the Japanese militarists into surrendering.
John Kerry recently visited Hiroshima. He became the first Secretary of State to do so -- purportedly as a precursor to a planned visit next month by President Obama, who is rumored to be considering an apology to Japan for America's dropping of the bombs 71 years ago.
The horrific bombings are inexplicable without examining the context in which they occurred.
In 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill insisted on the unconditional surrender of Axis aggressors. The bomb was originally envisioned as a way to force the Axis leader, Nazi Germany, to cease fighting. But the Third Reich had already collapsed by July 1945 when the bomb was ready for use, leaving Imperial Japan as the sole surviving Axis target.
Japan had just demonstrated with its nihilistic defense of Okinawa -- where more than 12,000 Americans died and more than 50,000 were wounded, along with perhaps 200,000 Japanese military and civilian casualties -- that it could make the Americans pay so high a price for victory that they might negotiate an armistice rather than demand surrender.
Tens of thousands of Americans had already died in taking the Pacific islands as a way to get close enough to bomb Japan. On March 9-10, 1945, B-29 bombers dropped an estimated 1,665 tons of napalm on Tokyo, causing at least as many deaths as later at Hiroshima.
Over the next three months, American attacks leveled huge swaths of urban Japan. U.S. planes dropped about 60 million leaflets on Japanese cities, telling citizens to evacuate and to call upon their leaders to cease the war.
Japan still refused to surrender and upped its resistance with thousands of Kamikaze airstrikes. By the time of the atomic bombings, the U.S. Air Force was planning to transfer from Europe much of the idle British and American bombing fleet to join the B-29s in the Pacific.
Perhaps 5,000 Allied bombers would have saturated Japan with napalm. The atomic bombings prevented such a nightmarish incendiary storm.
The bombs also cut short plans for an invasion of Japan -- an operation that might well have cost 1 million Allied lives, and at least three to four times that number of well-prepared, well-supplied Japanese defenders.
There were also some 2 million Japanese soldiers fighting throughout the Pacific, China and Burma -- and hundreds of thousands of Allied prisoners and Asian civilians being held in Japanese prisoner of war and slave labor camps. Thousands of civilians were dying every day at the hands of Japanese barbarism. The bombs stopped that carnage as well.
The Soviet Union, which signed a non-aggression pact with Japan in 1941, had opportunistically attacked Japan on the very day of the Nagasaki bombing.
By cutting short the Soviet invasion, the bombings saved not only millions more lives, but kept the Soviets out of postwar Japan, which otherwise might have experienced a catastrophe similar to the subsequent Korean War.
World War II was the most deadly event in human history. Some 60 million people perished in the six years between Germany's surprise invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, and the official Japanese surrender on Sept. 2, 1945. No natural disaster -- neither the flu pandemic of 1918 nor even the 14th-century bubonic plague that killed nearly two-thirds of Europe's population -- came close to the death toll of World War II.
Perhaps 80 percent of the dead were civilians, mostly Russians and Chinese who died at the hands of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Both aggressors deliberately executed and starved to death millions of innocents.
World War II was also one of the few wars in history in which the losers, Japan and Germany, lost far fewer lives than did the winners. There were roughly five times as many deaths on the Allied side, both military and civilian, as on the Axis side.
It is fine for Secretary of State Kerry and President Obama to honor the Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims. But in a historical and moral sense, any such commemoration must be offered in the context of Japanese and German aggression.
Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan started the respective European and Pacific theaters of World War II with surprise attacks on neutral nations. Their uniquely barbaric war-making led to the deaths of some 50 million Allied soldiers, civilians and neutrals -- a toll more than 500 times as high as that of Hiroshima.
This spring we should also remember those 50 million -- and who was responsible for their deaths.

Why 70 percent of companies paid zero in corporate taxes: They had zero profits

Why 70 percent of companies paid zero in corporate taxes: They had zero profits 

Two claims from the recently released Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on corporate income taxes are receiving widespread attention in the media. The first is that in 2012, 70% of all active companies paid zero corporate taxes and 20% of “profitable” companies had no tax liability. The second is that the effective tax rate for large profitable corporations amounted to about 16% of their “pre-tax income.” As it turns out, a closer look at the underlying IRS tax data shows that these claims rely heavily on how we define “profitable” and “pre-tax income.” Here’s why.
Corporations with zero tax liability
 The IRS Statistics of Income provides data on the total returns of all active U.S. corporations. The GAO study relies heavily on data provided in the Corporation Complete Reports. Looking more closely at the 2012 data (Table 18) and restricting the sample to the types of companies that the GAO included in its report, my own analysis finds the following. In 2012, out of 1.6 million corporate tax returns, only 51% were returns that had positive “net incomes,” and only 32% were returns that had positive “incomes subject to tax.” These are both measures of pre-tax income. However, while “net income” generally refers to the net profit or loss after allowing for certain usual deductions (such as depreciation allowances, compensation payments and interest), “income subject to tax” allows companies with positive “net incomes” to claim an additional deduction as a result of prior-year operating losses. These losses can be carried forward to offset taxable incomes in years when firms are making a profit or have positive net incomes; this is known as a net operating loss deduction (NOLD). For 2012, the data show that approximately 20% of companies with positive “net incomes” (or profits) claimed a net operating loss deduction resulting in a zero tax liability.
So my analysis of the data shows two things: first, the GAO claim that 70% of companies paid no income tax is largely because more than 50% of these companies had zero profits or net incomes, and therefore they had zero tax liability. Even tax reform is unlikely to get us to the point where we would start taxing unprofitable companies.
Secondly, some of these currently “profitable” (positive net income) companies have experienced large losses in prior years. For these companies, the NOL deduction allowed them to reduce their tax liability to zero. This trend explains the 20% of currently “profitable” companies that are paying zero taxes. Again, the NOLD provision is a largely sensible provision in the tax code. As per a recent report by the Congressional Research Service, having this provision in the tax code improves economic efficiency and reduces the distorting effect of taxation on investment decisions. The intent of this provision is, for example, to avoid a company with 5 years of consecutive operating losses of $20 million each having to pay income tax in year 6 simply because it realizes income of $20 million in that year. The principle underlying NOLD is intended to allow companies to get out of the hole of accumulated losses before the government can start claiming its fair share of the company’s income.
Effective Tax Rates
The 16% tax rate that is receiving wide attention is calculated by the GAO as total taxes paid divided by “net income.” However, the real taxable income or tax base (as intended in the tax code) is different from “net income” because, as discussed in the previous paragraph, it allows companies with positive net incomes to further write off losses incurred in previous years, using the NOLD. Only after accounting for the loss carryforwards and certain special deductions, do we get to the taxable income of the company, or what the IRS defines as “income subject to tax.” So the difference in effective tax rates (ETR) also comes from whether we define “net income” or “income subject to tax” as the pre-tax income. In a recent post, the Tax Foundation explains the many reasons why net income may differ from taxable income. A series of earlier Tax Foundation studies using data for 1997-2008 compute the ETR using the “income subject to tax” in the denominator, and find that in 2008 firms with asset sizes between $5 and $100 million had an the average ETR of 32.5%.
In the table below, using IRS data (Table 2), I compute the effective tax rate using both measures of the tax base for large companies in 2012.
Effective Tax Rates, 2012
Asset Size (Millions)Using “net income” in denominatorUsing “income subject to tax” in denominator
$5-$109.19%32.26%
$10-$2511.51%32.32%
$25-$5014.11%32.51%
$50-$10018.68%32.34%
$100-$25019.99%31.67%
These differences are striking. With pre-tax income defined as “income subject to tax,” the effective tax rate is nearly 20 percentage points higher than what we get using “net income” as the tax base. One reason this divergence matters currently is because over the course of the recession, many companies likely accumulated operating losses and their ability to use them in later years lowers their “income subject to tax.”
Of course, there are many different ways to define average effective tax rates. A January 2016 paper by the Office of Tax Analysis shows that there is wide divergence in tax rates depending upon the methodology used and particularly depending on the treatment of loss making firms.
A 2006 NBER paper by Alan Auerbach constructs a measure of average taxes paid and shows that average tax rates were above 45% in 2003, primarily because of the way losses are treated in the corporate tax code. So it is important to bear in mind that the 16% rate is the consequence of a chosen methodology and is at the lower end of comparable estimates.
Sum Up
 In fairness to the GAO, page 10 of the report highlights several reasons why firms may pay no federal tax. They claim that in “each of the years from 2008 to 2012, between approximately 49 to 54 percent of all active corporations had negative net tax income.” They also note that “corporations had positive net tax income that was completely offset by net operating loss deductions carried forward from prior tax years. In each year from 2008 to 2012, approximately 15 to 19 percent of all active corporations had their income completely offset in this manner.” Finally, they add that “the use of federal tax credits appears to have had little effect on the number of corporations that paid no tax in each year.”
So, the GAO clearly acknowledges that the reason 70% of companies are paying no taxes is because they are either not currently profitable or they are able to offset taxes because of prior-year losses. Further, using taxable income to compute ETRs, I find that effective tax rates are fairly close to the statutory rate of 35%, at least when using aggregate data.
As usual, headlines are more about hype than substance in this election season. We cannot simultaneously worry about U.S. companies inverting to low-tax countries to take advantage of low tax rates, while also claiming that U.S. companies already pay really low taxes. Clearly, the devil is in the details.

Feds use Sage Grouse to limit access to public lands

Feds use Sage Grouse to limit access to public lands 

New Sage Grouse Rules Limit Public Land Use

as published by Heartland.org
The proposal would affect energy development. Among other actions, the regulations would require oil and gas wells to be clustered in groups of a half-dozen or more to avoid scattering them across habitat of the greater sage grouse. Drilling near breeding areas would be prohibited during mating season, and power lines would be moved away from prime habitat to avoid serving as perches for raptors who prey on sage grouse.
State Plans, Industry Concerns Ignored
The new federal limits undermine plans Western state governments previously developed in conjunction with federal land management agencies, with input from affected industries, federal permit holders and environmental groups, in recent years.
Kathleen Sgamma vice-president of government and public affairs with the Western Energy Alliance told the Wall Street Journal, she believe believes state efforts adequately protect the sage grouse and “Western Energy Alliance will protest all land amendments that fail to conform with state plan, and will continue to support actions by Congress to delay these use plans and a final listing decision.” Sgamma told the associated press, “The economic impact of sage-grouse restrictions on just the oil and natural gas industry will be between 9,170 and 18,250 jobs and $2.4 billion to $4.8 billion of annual economic impact across Colorado, Montana, Utah and Wyoming.”
Congressional Republicans Object
Congressional Republicans’ criticized the new regulations as unnecessary federal overreach. For instance, Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT), chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee , said, “This is just flat out wrong.”
“The state plans work,” said Bishop. “This proposal is only about controlling land, not saving the bird.”
Shortly after Interior Secretary Sally Jewell announced the sage grouse rule changes, language sponsored by Rep. Bishop blocking the listing of the greater sage grouse passed the House as part of the Fiscal Year 2016 National Defense Authorization Act. The Public Lands Council and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association supported House efforts to prevent the sage grouse from being listed as endangered.
“Livestock grazing and wildlife habitat conservation go hand-in-hand, and ranchers have historically proven themselves to be the best stewards of the land,” said Brenda Richards, PLC president and NCBA member in a statement. “If sage grouse are designated for protection under the ESA, many ranchers may no longer be permitted to allow livestock to graze on or near sage grouse habitat, habitat which spans across 11 western states and encompasses 186 million acres of both federal and private land. This decision would not only destroy the ranching industry in the west, which is the backbone of many rural communities, it would also halt the conservation efforts currently underway by ranchers.”
Bishop’s provision would also prohibit the federal government from instituting their own management plans on federal lands going further than state plans already in place, thus countermanding the rule changes announced by Sec. Jewell if it becomes law.
Richards, who ranches in Idaho, explains in her statement, “The state plans that are already in place focus on improving sage grouse habitat, through decisions based on-the-ground where impacts to the bird can be best dealt.
“Ranchers in particular have consistently lived and operated in harmony with the sage grouse for many decades, and in fact, the core habitat areas are thriving largely due to a long history of well-managed grazing,” continues the statement. “It is a known fact that livestock grazing is the most cost effective and efficient method of removing fine fuel loads, such as grass, from the range thus preventing wildfire, which is one of the primary threats to the sage grouse. We must allow time for these state plans, orchestrated by folks closest to the land and to the issue at hand, to be fully implemented and to accomplish their goal of protecting this bird.”
Bette Grande (governmentrelations@heartland) is a Heartland Institute research fellow and former North Dakota state legislator.

Applying Basic Physics to Climate

Applying Basic Physics to Climate 

Climate Scientists Misapplied Basic Physics

A mistake in climate model architecture changes everything. Heat trapped by increasing carbon dioxide just reroutes to space from water vapor instead.
The scare over carbon dioxide was just due to a simple modelling error. A whole category of feedbacks was omitted, which greatly exaggerated the calculated sensitivity to carbon dioxide.

Main Messages

The scientists who believe in the carbon dioxide theory of global warming do so essentially because of the application of “basic physics” to climate, by a model that is ubiquitous and traditional in climate science. This model is rarely named, but is sometimes referred to as the “forcing-feedback framework/paradigm.” Explicitly called the “forcing-feedback model” (FFM) here, this pen-and-paper model estimates the sensitivity of the global temperature to increasing carbon dioxide.1
The FFM has serious architectural errors.2 It contains crucial features dating back to the very first model in 1896, when the greenhouse effect was not properly understood. Fixing the architecture, while keeping the physics, shows that future warming due to increasing carbon dioxide will be a fifth to a tenth of current official estimates. Less than 20% of the global warming since 1973 was due to increasing carbon dioxide.
The large computerized climate models (GCMs) are indirectly tailored to compute the same sensitivity to carbon dioxide as the FFM. Both explain 20th century warming as driven mostly by increasing carbon dioxide.3
Increasing carbon dioxide traps more heat. But that heat mainly just reroutes to space from water vapor instead. This all happens high in the atmosphere, so it has little effect on the Earth’s surface, where we live. Current climate models omit this rerouting. Rerouting cannot occur in the FFM, due to its architecture—rerouting is in its blindspot.4
The alarm over carbon dioxide can be traced back to an erroneous assumption implicitly made in 1896 and never corrected—that there are no significant feedbacks in response to increasing carbon dioxide rather than to surface warming. The rerouting feedback is such a feedback. The FFM introduced another erroneous assumption—that the heat blocked from leaving to space by increasing carbon dioxide causes the same surface warming as if, instead, absorbed sunlight is increased by the same amount,5 or more generally, surface warming is proportional to the sum of all radiative forcings. These assumptions are built into the architecture of the FFM, and are echoed in the GCMs.
Increasing carbon dioxide causes warming in the upper troposphere, because it blocks some heat from escaping to space from there. In the GCMs that heat travels down to warm the surface, where it is like heat from increased absorbed sunlight — due to water vapor amplification of surface warming, less heat is then radiated to space from water vapor. In reality that heat mainly reroutes, radiating to space from water vapor molecules instead. Crucial observations from the last few decades indicate that the heat radiated to space from water vapor has been increasing slightly, suggesting that the effect of rerouting (which lowers the water vapor emission layer) was outweighed by the effect of water vapor amplification due to the surface warming (which raises it).

Documents


This material was introduced in a series of blog posts on Joanne's blog. Note that the forcing-feedback model (FFM) was called the “conventional basic climate model” in these posts (omitting some words for brevity where context allowed). Those with a climate science background will likely find the posts tagged in red of more interest.
  • New Science 1: Introduction to the Series. The conventional basic model (now forcing-feedback model, FFM) of climate is the application of “basic physics” to climate. The idea that “it’s the physics” makes the CO2 theory impregnable in the minds of the establishment. Despite the numerous mismatches between theory and climate observations to date, many climate scientists remain firm in their belief in the danger of carbon dioxide essentially because of the conventional basic model, rather than because of huge opaque computer models. The basic model ignited concern about carbon dioxide; without it we probably wouldn’t be too worried.
  • New Science 2: The Conventional Basic Climate Model — Simple. Presenting the conventional basic climate model, in its simplest configuration—the only input is the change in carbon dioxide level, and there are no feedbacks. Computes the no-feedbacks equilibrium climate sensitivity as 1.2 °C.
  • New Science 3: The Conventional Basic Climate Model — In Full. Presenting the conventional basic model (FFM) of climate, in full—multiple inputs, and feedbacks. Computes the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) as 2.5 °C.
  • New Science 4: Error 1: Partial Derivatives. The conventional basic model relies heavily on partial derivatives. A partial derivative is the ratio of the changes in two variables, when everything apart from those two variables is held constant. But in climate everything depends on everything, so it is not possible to hold everything constant except for only two variables, as required for a partial derivative to exist. The partial derivatives are not empirically verifiable, so employing them in a climate model incurs unknown approximations.
  • New Science 5: Error 2: Omitting Feedbacks that are not Temperature-Dependent. In the conventional basic model every “feedback” (something that affects what caused it) is in response to surface warming—directly dependent on the surface temperature, but not on the climate drivers or on other feedbacks. Feedbacks rule the climate. Due to its architecture, if there feedbacks to climate drivers exist (such as the rerouting feedback in post 7 below) the model omits them.
  • New Science 6: How the Greenhouse Effect Works. Heat radiated to space (outgoing longwave radiation, or OLR) is mostly emitted by four disparate emissions layers: the water vapor emissions layer, the CO2 emissions layer, cloud tops, and the surface. The hotter a layer, the more it emits. The so-called greenhouse effect exists because OLR is emitted from an emission layer high in the atmosphere, where it is cold, rather than from the surface, where it is warm. The total emissions must equal the heat absorbed from the Sun and has to be emitted somehow, so the surface is much warmer than it would be if most of the OLR wasn’t emitted from high in the cold atmosphere.
  • New Science 7: The Rerouting Feedback. We propose the “rerouting feedback”, in which OLR blocked by an increasing CO2 concentration is mostly just rerouted to space via emission from water vapor and clouds tops instead. Occurring high in the atmosphere, this feedback to increasing CO2 is omitted from the conventional basic climate model, which can only contain feedbacks in response to surface warming. Increasing CO2 warms the upper troposphere, because less OLR is emitted from there by CO2 molecules. This heats neighboring molecules, including water vapor molecules in the water vapor emissions layer (WVEL), so more OLR is emitted by water vapor molecules. Because the WVEL emits more it must be at a higher average temperature. The average height of the WVEL declines, becauses the upper troposphere is more stable and convection is less vigorous. Humidity builds up and clouds condense at lower levels, suggesting the average height of the cloud top emission layer would also decline, and more OLR is emitted from cloud tops.
  • New Science 8: Applying the Stefan-Boltzmann Law to Earth.The Stefan-Boltzmann equation only applies to a solid isothermal surface, so it cannot be literally applied to Earth. However it can effectively be applied to the Earth as seen from space if the Earth's temperature is considered to be its “radiating temperature”, defined simply as the temperature that satisfies the Stefan-Boltzmann equation with the OLR and emissivity (~0.995) of the Earth.
  • New Science 9: Error 3: All Radiation Imbalances Treated the Same. The response of any climate model to increased absorbed solar radiation (ASR) is its “solar response”. Due to its architecture, the conventional basic model applies its solar response to the radiation imbalance caused by any influence on climate, even a radiation imbalance due to increased CO2—one size fits all. However increased ASR causes increased OLR, whereas increased CO2 does not change the total OLR (when steady state resumes, ignoring minor surface albedo feedbacks). Also, increased ASR mainly adds energy to the surface, but increased CO2 blocks energy leaving Earth from the upper atmosphere. So it is physically unrealistic to apply the solar response to the influence of extra CO2.
  • New Science 10: Externally-Driven Albedo (EDA). Albedo is the fraction of incoming radiation reflected back out to space without heating the Earth, about 30%. Externally-driven albedo (EDA) is the albedo other than that due to feedback in response to surface warming—presumably it is caused by external influences. Here we show that EDA has at least twice as much influence on surface warming, and maybe much more than that, as the direct effect of variations in the total solar irradiance (TSI).
  • New Science 11: An Alternative Modeling Strategy. The road-map for building an alternative model without the problems of the conventional basic model. A paradigm shift from summing forcings to summing warmings is proposed. Each climate influence has its own response (sensitivity and feedbacks), instead of all using the solar response as in the conventional basic model. Radiation must still balance, so this constraint is applied to the sum-of-warmings model. An OLR model based on physical parameters of emission layers estimates the change in OLR, leaving only the CO2 response parameter as an unknown when the sum-of-warmings model is joined to the OLR model to form the alternative model. Observations over a period allow the CO2 response parameter to be estimated, and thus the sensitivity to CO2.
  • New Science 12: Modeling the Thermal Inertia of the Earth. The relationship between absorbed solar radiation (ASR) and the radiating temperature is a low pass filter. This is at the heart of the solar response in the sum-of-warmings model within the alternative model.
  • New Science 13: The Sum-of-Warmings Model. The sum-of-warmings model independently calculates the surface warming due to each climate driver (such as increasing absorbed solar radiation, or increasing carbon dioxide), then adds them. This allows each climate driver to have its own specific response, including feedbacks.
  • New Science 14: Emission Layer Parameters. Basic information about the layers that emit OLR—such as how much OLR comes from each emission layer, and the heights of the emissions layers.
  • New Science 15: The OLR Model. The OLR model estimates how much the outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) to space changes with changes to the heights of the emission layers, the lapse rate, the surface temperature, the cloud fraction, and the CO2 concentration.
  • New Science 16: The Alternative Basic Climate Model. The sum-of-warmings model (post 13) and the OLR model (post 15) are joined together to form the alternative basic model.
  • New Science 17: Solving the Mystery of the Missing “Hotspot”. In the conventional models (including the GCMs), surface warming for any reason causes the water vapor emissions layer (WVEL) to ascend, creating “the hotspot”. In the alternative model, surface warming and the solar response both cause the WVEL to ascend, while the CO2 response (how the planet reacts to increased CO2) causes the WVEL to descend—which is consistent with the rerouting feedback. The last few decades saw surface warming, increased ASR, and increased CO2, while the empirical data from the radiosondes and the better satellite analysis showed that the WVEL did not ascend and may have descended. The conventional models (including the GCMs) are wrong—they apply the solar response to both increased ASR and increased CO2, so they say all the forces on the WVEL were causing it to ascend. The alternative model resolves the data—there were opposing forces acting on the WVEL, the hotspot is indeed missing, and the CO2 response was stronger than the solar response over the last few decades.
  • New Science 18: Calculating the ECS Using the Alternative Model. Fitting the data to the alternative model, we conclude that the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS), the surface warming per doubling of the CO2 concentration, might be almost zero, is likely less than 0.25 °C, and most likely less than 0.5 °C. Most likely, less than 20% of the global warming since 1970 is due to increasing carbon dioxide. The CO2 response is less than a third as strong as the solar response—both measured in degrees of surface warming per unit of radiation imbalance.
  • New Science 19: Comments on Conventional versus Alternative. General comments tying together some of the main ideas of the series to date.
  • New Science 19b: Synopsis announced. Download the synopsis.
Related blog posts:
  • Lucia has a Bad Day with Partial Derivatives. Over at the Blackboard, Lucia thought David had made some errors with partial derivatives in post 3, and was talking about GCMs in post 4. This post is a reply, showing her how to do partial differentiation, and correcting her misconception.
  • Lucia has a Bad Week on Partial Derivatives. Over at the Blackboard, Lucia dug a deeper hole, this time focusing on the existence of the partial derivatives in the conventional basic model. This post is a reply, showing that her alternative development was mere notational trickery. Having read carefully through Lucia‘s two posts and their comments, we are still waiting for Lucia to find any mistakes in our posts above or even made any informed criticism of them.

1 The physicists got it right; the climate scientists got it wrong. It’s the application to climate that is problematic, not the physics. That application is called the “forcing-feedback model” (FFM) here so that it can be discussed explicitly. The FFM is ubiquitous in climate science, embedded in the conversation. It is the basic expression of the feedback-forcing paradigm or framework, which underlies much of climate science. It’s the basic mental model, so pervasive that one might overlook it because it is everywhere. One can construct the FFM just from what “everyone knows” in climate science. Yet it does not have a formal name, perhaps because it has been omnipresent for decades.
2 The errors presumably went unnoticed because critics focused on the values of the parameter values in the model, such as how much heat is trapped by increasing carbon dioxide, rather than on how the model combines those parameters to estimate future warming. Also, for some of the last century, the model seemed to explain the temperature trend.
3 While the GCMs obviously do not treat extra carbon dioxide and extra absorbed sunlight identically, they treat them essentially the same—the GCMs warm the surface by about the same amount for a given forcing of either, and in both cases the GCMs reduce the heat radiated to space by water vapor (due to “water vapor amplification” of the surface warming).
The GCMs are bottom-up models that try to produce observable macro trends by modelling masses of minor details; many details are not known exactly, so some scaling and tweaking is necessary. However the GCMs are effectively tailored to produce the same sensitivity to carbon dioxide as the forcing-feedback model (FFM), in three steps:
  1. The FFM estimates the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) to carbon dioxide as ~2.5 °C.
  2. A sensitivity of ~2.5 °C very roughly accounts for observed warming since 1910. To believers in the FFM, this confirms that increasing carbon dioxide is mostly responsible for 20th century warming.
  3. So GCMs use increasing carbon dioxide as the dominant driver to reproduce 20th century warming. GCMs that do not succeed in this task are not published (see p. 32 here).
But this ECS estimate is too large: fixing the faulty architecture shows it is less than 0.5 °C. So the GCMs omit the main driver(s) of global warming, and are doomed to never be able to explain global warming properly. Notice how they cannot explain global surface temperatures outside the period 1910 to 2000, and how they have not narrowed the ECS estimate by the FFM in the Charney Report of 1979 (namely 1.6 to 4.5 °C)—despite all the effort, computing power, and money spent since 1979, the ECS estimate in AR5 is 1.5 to 4.5 °C.
4 The rerouting feedback may have evaded notice because it cannot exist in the conventional architecture: the conventional basic model only includes feedbacks in response to surface warming. But the rerouting feedback is a response to increased carbon dioxide, which is not a “feedback” as the term is traditionally used in climate science. The Glossary of the IPCC's 5th Assessment Report (2013), while acknowledging the usual meaning of “feedback”, defines a “feedback” more narrowly as a response to surface warming. Some feedbacks that are not in response to surface warming have started appearing in the GCMs, but they are minor.
Including the rerouting feedback in the GCMs would greatly lower their estimate of sensitivity of surface temperature to increasing carbon dioxide—presumably to less than 20% of current estimates, as per the alternative basic model here. This would mean the GCMs could not account for recent warming (either from 1910 or from 1970) with increased carbon dioxide. This is politically difficult, perhaps unthinkable.
5 This assumption is obviously wrong. Extra absorbed sunlight changes the total heat radiated by the Earth, but extra carbon dioxide does not (ignoring the minor surface albedo changes due to surface warming)—because total outflow is just equal to the inflow (once steady state resumes). Increasing carbon dioxide merely redistributes the emissions between the various emitters to space: water vapor, carbon dioxide, the surface, cloud tops, etc. Ever since 1896, climate scientists have been convincing themselves that a decrease in heat outflow is equivalent to a matching increase in heat inflow, as assumed in the FFM. While it is equivalent with respect to the amount of heat on Earth, it is not equivalent in terms of how the outgoing heat is distributed between the various emitters—which is what matters, because surface warming is determined only by the change in emissions from the surface (a warmer surface emits more to space).
Externally-driven albedo involving the Sun is the main cause of warming, but it is omitted from all current climate models.

Sunday, April 24, 2016

This 1979 Time Magazine Article About Islam will Blow Your Mind! - Freedom Outpost

This 1979 Time Magazine Article About Islam will Blow Your Mind! 

This 1979 Time Magazine Article About Islam will Blow Your Mind!


“We Muslims are one family even though we live under different governments and in various regions.” – Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of Iran’s revolution
Thirty-seven years ago, Time magazine dedicated its cover to “Islam, The Militant Revival,” and published a lengthy article, “The World of Islam,” in which John A. Meyer wrote, “We want to examine Islam’s resurgence, not simply as another faith but as a political force and potent third ideology competing with Marxism and Western culture in the world today.” It was April 16, 1979.
The editor, Marguerite Johnson, penned the cover story because “the Iranian revolution has made it especially important for Westerners to understand the driving energy and devotion Islam commands from so many.”
Senior editor John Elson indicated that “Islam has been frequently misunderstood, partly because so many people have tried to apply terms from Christianity and Judaism to it.” In writing this article, the editors have attempted to draw a picture of Islam for what it really is, “a way of ordering society.”
According to Time magazine, there were 750 million Muslims and 985 million Christians in 1979, a large group ready to assert the “political power of the Islamic way of life.” The people of Iran apparently voted overwhelmingly to create an Islamic republic, the nation’s first “government of God,” as Ayatullah Khomeini declared.
This theocratic and freedom-stifling government replaced, after one year of revolution, “a dynastic autocrat who dreamed of turning his country into a Western-style industrial and secular state.” Changing a westernized society into a government by religious mullahs was described as “a new dawn for the Islamic people.”
Time magazine quoted the Cairo’s magazine, Al Da’wah (The Call): “The Muslims are coming, despite Jewish cunning, Christian hatred, and the Communist storm.”
And it came to pass - the Muslims are really coming, by the millions, invading Europe and America, welcomed with open arms by a senescent and suicidal Europe ruled by technocrat elitists who are only interested in failed multi-culturalism, their power, control of the emerging tower of Babel, and their bank accounts.
Time magazine described the revival of Islam in the 70 countries around the world, reflected in the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, unchanged for 14 centuries; this alleged revival took place among the young who desired sharia law, burkas, hijab and other forms of enslaving women to their half-person status, genital mutilation, and harsh punishments in cases of rape, divorce, adultery, and abortion.
Time magazine assumed that this alleged revival had taken place for decades because “Islam is no Friday-go-to-mosque kind of religion. It is a code of honor, a system of law and an all-encompassing way of life.”
This resurgence was inspired and fueled by a “quest for stability and roots,” a deep-seated hatred for Western values, and “the population explosion in those Islamic nations where birth control is little practiced.”
Marvin Zonis is quoted that “Islam is being used as a vehicle for striking back at the West, in the sense of people trying to reclaim a very greatly damaged sense of self-esteem. They feel that for the past 150 years the West has totally overpowered them culturally, and in the process their own institutions and way of life have become second rate.”
“Islam is a political faith with a yearning for expansion,” said Marguerite Johnson. And the history of its expansionist desires is quite telling, an expansionism that necessitated the Christian Crusades in order to regain territories occupied by Islam.
Arabs raided and conquered many lands and their traders carried Islam with them; the Persian Empire, the Byzantine Empire, North Africa into Spain, the Middle East, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines, the black tribes in Africa south of the Sahara Desert, were all forced into submission and conversion to Islam. Time magazine added that, “On the Indian subcontinent, in Southeast Asia, in Africa and the Pacific, millions of Muslims were under colonial rule.”
Time magazine remarked that “Islam is frequently stereotyped as unmitigatedly harsh in its code of law, intolerant of other religions, repressive toward women and incompatible with progress.” No mention is made of the Koranic quotes which advise their faithful to kill the infidels.
Salem Azzam, then Saudi secretary-general of the Islamic Council of Europe, was quoted as saying that seeing this Islamic resurgence in a negative light is nothing but a “return to colonialism – indirect but of a more profound type.”
Other Muslims and their defenders claimed that “Islam is not monolithic, that it is compatible with various social and economic systems, and that far from being a return to the Dark Ages, it is wholly consonant with progress.” The reality is that the Taliban had oppressed and regressed a thriving Afghan society.
The “war refugees” from Syria, who have invaded welfare-generous European countries and are raping and pillaging the host societies, have gravely affected the very tolerant and multi-cultural nations who foolishly invited them in with open arms.
Devout Muslims are described in this article as opposed to the “materialism of the West and the atheism of Communism.” But they welcome “individual initiative, respect private property, and tolerate profits.” But moderation and “communal responsibility” are most important. Usury is forbidden but interest is allowed if used for the “common good.” Community and the common good are communist tenets.  A zakat of 2.5%, levied against individual assets, was allowed for the benefit of the community.
A devout Muslim objects to the evils associated with modern life but enjoys everything free that the west must provide, such as welfare, housing, TVs, cell phones, cable, cars, electricity, A/C, etc. The Time article stated that Islam objects to “liquor factories,” to the “breakdown of the family structure, the lowering of moral standards, [and] the appeal of easygoing secular life-styles.” But Muslims “are demanding the best of the West: schools, hospitals, technology, agricultural and water development techniques.”
Devout Muslims, no matter where they live, are required to abide by Sharia Law, “the path to follow.” The consensus of Islamic scholars in charge and the deeds and sayings of Muhammad become an “all embracing code of ethics, morality and religious duties.” It is thus a complete control of one’s life.
Once entrenched in the western civilization, Muslims start chiseling at its foundation in an effort to turn it into Sharia-compliance; everything that made western schools, hospitals, agriculture, military, and technology great in the first place, will be replaced with what is approved by the Islamic theocracy.
No matter how the media spins Islam then and now, Sharia Law and our U.S. Constitution are not compatible. Moral relativism and tolerance to the point of ignorance will result in national suicide.

Saturday, April 23, 2016

Never Forget: Communism Destroys Lives

Never Forget: Communism Destroys Lives

Never Forget: Communism Destroys Lives

New videos show younger generations what communism was really like. It’s not pretty.
Nicole Russell
By

When you think of a recent example of wartime oppression, typically the Holocaust comes to mind. How could it not? The atrocious death toll, the inhumane death camps and the victorious end to World War II are still prevalent subjects in books, film, and on college campuses.
But what about Soviet Communism? Some estimate that under Joseph Stalin’s regime, 20 million people were murdered. Even more mind-boggling: Technology gurus had been making telephone calls from mobile phones for ten years when Soviet Communists were still forcing millions of people to work in slave labor camps under unimaginably brutal conditions by the time our Allies forced that regime to end.
What of those communism touched? The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation preserves the stories of those who’ve lived under communist regimes, now in the form of several short online videos—and they are as horrifying as they are hopeful.

What Life Is Like in Communist Countries

Founded in 1994, the foundation’s mission is simple but powerful: To educate this and future generations about the ideology, history, and legacy of communism. Through its Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom, over the years the foundation has honored dissidents against communism, including recipients such as Pope John Paul II. Two years after President George W. Bush dedicated a memorial to remembering the victims of communism, the foundation launched several exhibits online. These showcase various expert-authored essays on communism, maps, timelines, and, most recently, a 3D interactive Gulag, demonstrating what life might have been like in a camp.
The website features a 3D interactive Gulag, demonstrating what life might have been like in a camp.
The Foundation estimates there are 100,000,000 victims of communism, but until now, it was nearly impossible to convey their experience in one place, save for a few books and documentaries here and there, and especially in brief, simple, layman’s terms. Many high-school textbooks are leaving out or rearranging big chunks of communist history. The Foundation’s Witness Project fills those gaps entirely, and in a way that’s as appealing to older generations as it is to younger.
The Witness Project is a collection of online videos that marry history textbook and novel, war movie and documentary. The roughly five-minute videos tell one person’s specific experience dealing with communism. Men and women, wealthy and poor, they hail from Hungary, China, Vietnam, and Ukraine, among others. Their stories are as unbelievable as they are fascinating, as chilling as they are powerful. Their goal is as obvious as the truth in the stories they tell: People must understand the horrors of communism to avoid repeating them.

Survivors of Communism Tell Their Stories

One woman’s story is particularly brutal. Jinhye Jo was born in North Korea. With no food to feed his starving family, her father attempted to escape to China. North Korean officials caught and killed him, then lied to her family about how he died. Later, her mother was nearly beat to death for speaking poorly of the North Korean government. The video concludes with Jo’s sad words: “I want to say to the American people. Don’t think the North Korean government is like you or I…They are like the devil.”
The project’s first video is about the life of Daniel Magay. He gives us a brief but compelling glimpse into what life was like when shaped by communism in Hungary. Magay grew up in a wealthy family, the son of a landowner. But then Russia occupied the country and, he says, “Everything turned upside down.”
Magay describes the regime this way: “Under the communist system, they started developing the Hungarian KGB. The people who were willing to compromise themselves became a part of the system. My father did not compromise himself.” His father paid a price for this courage. His family was forced from their home and “friends” of the government watched him night and day. Magay won a gold medal for fencing in the 1956 Olympics in Australia, and decided not to return home, but to seek refuge in the United States. Still, the scars of communism remain. “I hated the system. I felt it took my soul.”
Short but powerful history lessons at the touch of a fingertip: what better way to educate the next generation about a political system that destroyed so many people? Hope, it seems, appears in many different ways.

Climate Change Won’t Kill You – Having No Electrical Power Will | Watts Up With That?

Climate Change Won’t Kill You – Having No Electrical Power Will 

Climate Change Won’t Kill You – Having No Electrical Power Will

Guest essay by Tom D. Tamarkin
Abstract
AGW or climate change is not the big problem many claim. The perceived scare of AGW has been used by sub-groups in the United Nations to bluff wealthy industrialized nations into transferring money to poor often times corrupt nations. Monies gained from this mechanism have not been invested in the root cause of AGW (if in fact any exists.) At the same time over $1 trillion USD is spent worldwide annually on climate change studies, consultants, related government agencies, and the rapidly growing but totally ineffective green and renewable energy industry. This has also lead to the emergence of the carbon trading brokerage industry. This is based on fraudulent science as CO2 has an extremely small “greenhouse” effect far exceeded by water vapor from the oceans. Only fossil hydrocarbon fuels and nuclear energy can supply material amounts of energy due to their many orders of magnitude higher energy flux densities than so called renewables. Well over half the world’s economically viable recoverable fossil fuels have been consumed while over 3 billion human inhabitants live in “energy poverty:” over 1.5 billion without electricity. Once fossil fuels are depleted beyond the point of economically viable production there is only one energy source available to provide the Earth’s energy needs. That is the conversion of matter into energy as formulated in the equation E=mc2. Man must learn to generate energy based on his knowledge of the laws of physics and the interchangeability of matter into energy. Today we have started with the baby step of nuclear fission. Fission is practical and works today but is unsustainable due to radioactive waste issues. Therefore, we must immediately invest in the experimental understanding of the science leading to the successful demonstration of controlled atomic fusion followed by the R&D needed to commercialize it. Fusion is 100% safe, uses virtually unlimited fuel cycle non-radioactive light element components, and produces no significant radioactive byproducts. In the alternative, man will run out of fossil fuels. AGW is then a 100% moot point because hydrocarbon fuels are not being burned in material quantities. Under these conditions worldwide population will shrink to preindustrial revolution levels of about 10% of today’s population or about 700,000 750 million people worldwide.
Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) or climate change is not the BIG problem its advocates make it out to be. Even if it could be proved that man is creating it through his use of hydro-carbon fossil fuels, it is not the truly BIG problem.
Climate change has always been a part of the Earth’s dynamic atmospheric system. During the last 2 billion years the Earth’s climate has alternated between a frigid “Ice House” climate, today’s moderate climate, , and a steaming “Hot House” climate, as in the time of the dinosaurs.
Principal contributing factors to the variability of the Earth’s median temperature and climate are the Earth’s complex orbit in the solar system as defined by the Milankovitch cycles, the sun’s variable radiated energy output, and geological factors on Earth such as undersea volcanic activity leading to inconsistent temperature gradients in the oceans.
This chart shows how global climate has changed over geological time.
climate change graph
Unfortunately, the potential threat of predicted future climate change has been used to transfer enormous amounts of money from wealthy nations to poor nations [1]. This has enabled the survival instinct mechanisms of the climate change community. That includes governments, consultants, and scientific researchers who simply study the perceived problem and generate academic journal articles and reports. The ineffective green energy solutions manufacturing and service industry also owes their life…and government subsidies…to the climate change scare. No serious money raised by the “climate scare” has been spent on solving the BIG problem.
The BIG problem is the fact that man was provided with about 400 years’ worth of hydrocarbon based fossil fuels which took several hundred million years to be created on Earth. The energy came from the Sun[2]. Integrated over large amounts of geological time, daily Sun energy was converted into chemicals through plant photosynthesis. These chemicals can, in-turn, be ignited to release the stored energy through an oxidation reduction reaction with oxygen [3]. Once they are gone they are gone in human life cycle terms.
What is energy? A physicists will answer by saying “the ability to perform work.” They will elaborate by saying: “energy is a property of objects which can be transferred to other objects or converted into different forms, but cannot be created or destroyed.”
A housewife will say energy is what moves our cars, powers our airplanes, cooks our food, and keeps us warm in the winter – cool in the summer.
You cannot power a world estimated to have 9 billion people by 2060 on energy produced from solar cells and wind turbines.
They are not sustainable meaning they cannot create enough energy quickly enough to reproduce themselves (build more) and provide energy to man. The reason is that the amount of energy received from the Sun is far “too dilute” meaning a very small amount of energy is received per square unit of surface area for relatively short periods of time given the day-night cycle and weather conditions [4].
Wind energy is a secondary effect of solar energy because wind is created by the atmosphere’s absorption of the Sun’s thermal energy in combination with the Coriolis force effect [5]. This is based on the rotation of the Earth coupled with atmospheric pressure differences relating to elevation, mountains, and the like [6].
Hydro power from dammed rives is also a secondary effect of solar energy. The movement of water in the Earth’s vast system of rivers occurs because of solar energy. This happens as seawater is evaporated, forms clouds, and ultimately water is released as rain and snow keeping our rivers full and flowing out to sea from higher elevations propelled by gravity. Unlike solar and wind, hydropower can consistently produce material but limited amounts of energy.
energy flux density
The above illustration shows energy flux density in million Joules per litter on the left hand vertical axis with a scale spanning 10 to the 16th power in scientific notation. The horizontal axis depicts time on the top row from 0 years Common Era to 2200. The bottom row depicts worldwide population which is directly controlled by available energy to produce food, potable water and to provide for man’s comfort. As can be seen, once fossil hydro-carbon fuels are no longer available in quantity, fusion energy must be developed or worldwide population will contract to that of the preindustrial age in the 1600s. Energy flux density refers to how much energy is contained per unit volume of an energy source. Appendix 1 below provides tabulation for various energy sources.
We must begin to turn to what Dr. Steve Cowley in the UK calls “energy from knowledge;” the conversion of mass into energy [7]. Albert Einstein formulated the relationship between energy and mas (matter) in his famous equation E = mc2. This means that a very small amount of mass is equal to a very large amount of energy as explained by Dr. Einstein in his own voice [8].
We must solve energy for the long term through the conversion of matter into energy. No other energy source has a suitable energy flux density to provide our electricity, transportation, potable water and agricultural needs once fossil hydro-carbon fuels are no longer economically viable to recover due to depletion [9].
We must begin now because it will take several decades to master the science. We began this journey when we developed nuclear fission power. However nuclear fission is not a long term solution for several reasons; most notably the long-term radioactive waste it produces.
The next step is the development of nuclear fusion. Fusion is much different than fission[101112]. It uses light elements in the fuel cycle, is fail safe, and can do no environmental harm. It has the highest flux density of any energy source short of matter anti-matter annihilation.
It will take several more years of pure experimental scientific research to demonstrate a sustained fusion reaction in the laboratory producing a net energy gain meaning more energy is produced than was “pumped in” to start the energy production [13]. Once controlled fusion is proven in a controlled environment, regardless of how expensive and complicated the reactor mechanism and facility is, man’s ingenuity will take over in the private sector. The complexities and costs will be driven down just as turn of the 20th century vacuum tubes gave way to transistors and later microcomputers-on-a-chip.
That is the BIG problem. If we do not solve this, in 50 to 100 years our coal, oil, and natural gas resources will no longer be economically and environmentally recoverable [14]. Then mankind reverts back to life in the 16th century. If we do not solve energy the entire argument of being good environmental stewards of the Earth is moot. Why? Because in less than 100 years we will no longer be burning fossil hydro-carbon fuels. Global warming and climate change caused by man is no longer an issue. The problem takes care of itself. In a few thousand years the processes of nature…geological and geo-chemical…will erase most signs of our past industrialized existence.
If there are not sizable numbers of cognitively intelligent humans capable of thinking and distinguishing beauty, it is a nonconsequential point as aliens are not flocking to our planet. No one or no thing will ever know the difference. Which begs the question: “Is there intelligent life on Earth?” This author believes so. As Bill & Melinda Gates recently stated in their recentfoundation’s annual open letter, our youth needs to be challenged to produce what they called an “energy miracle” [15].
This is the biggest problem man faces. Climate change…if caused by man…automatically reverses itself over the next 100 years. But if we do not solve energy mankind’s population will contract by a factor greater than 10 over the course of the following 100 years. Collectively, we as a species must recognize this reality and begin the energy race today.

References:

[1] Another Climate Alarmist Admits Real Motive Behind Warming Scare, Investor’s Business Daily, March 29, 2016.
[2] Tamarkin, Tom D., Energy Basics; Where does energy on our planet come from?, Fusion 4 Freedom.
[3] Heats of Combustion, UC Davis Chemistry Wiki.
[4] Lawson, Barrie & Tamarkin, Tom D., Going Solar-System Requirements For Solar Generated Utility Baseload Power, Fusion 4 Freedom.
[5] Consequences of Rotation for Weather; Coriolis Forces, Universe of Tennessee Knoxville.
[6] Atmospheric Pressure at Different Altitudes, AVS Science & Technology of Materials, Interfaces, & Processing, https://www.avs.org/.
[7] Fusion energy with Professor Steven Cowley, Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, UK.
[8] William Tucker, Ph.D., Understanding E = MC2, Dr. Albert Einstein in his own voice & explanation, Energytribune.com.
[9] Tamarkin, Tom D., Energy Basics, Comparison of fuel energy flux densities, Fusion 4 Freedom.
[10] Duke Energy Nuclear Information Center, Fission vs. Fusion – What’s the Difference?
[11] Lawson, Barrie, Nuclear Fission Theory, Fusion 4 Freedom.
[12] Lawson, Barrie, Nuclear Fusion-The Theory, Fusion 4 Freedom.
[13] Tamarkin, Tom D., Fusion Energy; Too Important to Fail – Too Big To Hoard, Fusion 4 Freedom.
[14] Tamarkin, Tom D. 2060 And Lights Out: How Will America Survive Without Oil?, Inquisitir Special Report, http://www.inquisitr.com.
[15] Gates, Bill & Melinda, Gates Foundation Annual Open Letter, James, Murray, Guardian, February 24, 2016.

Appendix 1

Energy Flux Density Comparisons
Energy density is the amount of energy stored in a given system or region of space per unit volume. Specific energy is the amount of energy stored per unit mass (weight.) Only the useful or extractable energy is measured. It is useful to compare the energy densities of various energy sources. At the top of the list is fusion followed by nuclear fission and then hydrocarbon fuels derived from petroleum, coal and natural gas. At the bottom of the list are batteries which either generate energy or store energy as well as “renewable energy” such as solar.
1 Kg of Deuterium fused with 1.5 Kg of Tritium can produce 87.4 GWH of electricity
Here are the underlying calculations supporting the statement above:
The energy released by fusion of 1 atom of Deuterium with 1 atom of Tritium is 17.6 Mev = 2.8 X 1012 Joules.
The energy liberated by the fusion of 1 Kg of Deuterium with 1.5 Kg of Tritium is 2.8 X 1012X 2.99 X 1026 = 8.3 X 1014 Joules = (8.3 X 1014 ) / (3.6 X 1012 ) = 230 GWHours.
This energy is released as heat. A conventional steam turbine power plant with an efficiency of 38%, would produce 87.4GWH of electricity
1 Deuterium is a naturally occurring isotope of hydrogen readily available from sea water.
2 Tritium is produced in the fusion reactor from Lithium as part of the fuel cycle and energy exchange process. Lithium is an abundant naturally occurring element.
Comparison of conventional fuel energy density
energy output of conventional fuels
Comparison of “renewable” energy density
energy output of renewable fuels
1 How much solar power per cubic meter is there? The volume of the space between a one-meter-square patch on Earth and the center of our orbit around the sun is 50 billion cubic meters (the earth is 150 billion meters from the sun, or 4,000 earth circumferences). Dividing the usable 100 watts per square meter by this volume, yields two-billionths of a watt per cubic meter. Sunlight takes about eight minutes(499 seconds) to reach the earth. Multiplying 499 seconds by twenty-six billionths of a W/m3 reveals that solar radiation has an energy density of 1.5 microjoules per cubic meter (1.5 x 10-6 J/m3).
2 The only way to extract thermal energy from the atmosphere is to construct an insulated pipe between it and a reservoir at lower temperature (preferably a much lower one). This is how geothermal heat pumps work. Typical ground temperature is 52F (284 K). On a 90F day, such a system has a peak efficiency of 7%, and a power density of only 0.05 mW/m3 (Stopa and Wojnarowski 2006): typical surface power fluxes for geothermal wells are on the order of 50 mW/m2 and have typical depths of 1 km. To find the energy density, a characteristic time must be included. The time used should be that of the time required for water being pumped into the ground to circulate through the system once. This number is on the order of ten days (Sanjuan et al. 2006). The resulting energy density is 0.05 J/m3, or roughly two to three orders of magnitude lower than wind or waves.
3 Wind is driven by changes in weather patterns, which in turn are driven by thermal gradients. Tides are driven by fluctuations in gravity caused by lunar revolutions. The energy densities of wind and water systems are proportional to the mass, m, moving through them, and the square of the speed, v, of this mass, or ½mv2. At sea level, air with a density of about one kilogram per cubic meter moving at five meters per second (ten miles per hour) has a kinetic energy of 12.5 joules per cubic meter. Applying Betz’s Law, which limits efficiency to 59% (Betz 1926), yields about seven joules per cubic meter. Thus, wind energy on a moderately windy day is over a million times more energy-dense than solar energy.
There are two prevalent mechanisms for extracting tidal energy. In one system, barrages move up and down, extracting energy with the rise and fall of the tides. On the second type strategy, tidal stream systems act more like underwater wind turbines, extracting energy from tidal waters as they move past. As with wind, the energy of a moving volume of water is also ½mv2. Tidal systems have the advantage over wind systems in that water is approximately one thousand times denser than air. Their disadvantage lies in generally low tidal velocities of only ten centimeters per second to one meter per second. Thus, a cubic meter of water, with a mass of about 1000 kg, yields an energy density of about five joules per cubic meter for slow water1and five hundred joules per cubic meter for fast water2. These are also subject to Betz’s law and represent only peak values, so the average energy densities are closer to one-half of a joule per cubic meter to fifty joules per cubic meter, or about the same as wind.
1 kinetic energy (tidal low velocity) = ½ mv2 = ½ · 1000 kg · (0.1 m/s)2 = 5 joules.
2 kinetic energy (tidal high velocity) = ½ mv2 = ½ · 1000 kg · (1 m/s)2 = 500 joules.