Friday, January 1, 2021
Thursday, December 31, 2020
You're free, stop whining | Ben Shapiro LIVE at George Washington University
Wednesday, December 30, 2020
Tuesday, December 29, 2020
Monday, December 28, 2020
Sunday, December 27, 2020
Saturday, December 26, 2020
Evil Isn’t A Sickness
Friday, December 25, 2020
Sunday, February 2, 2020
Wednesday, January 1, 2020
Saturday, August 17, 2019
Friday, August 16, 2019
New Asian flu?
Thursday, August 15, 2019
Wednesday, August 14, 2019
Tuesday, August 13, 2019
Is the IPCC a reliable source of information on matters pertaining to climate change? Why? - Quora
i) IPCC was not founded to simply aggregate climate science findings but to collect evidence for man-made climate change. This one-eyed look at the results over-emphasized of course the human influence. The knowledge of the natural changes came second hand which explains the confusion surrounding the current Hiatus.
ii) WG1 is doing an excellent job in describing the science and should be read by anyone interested in the subject. The science presented is correct but do not cover all scientific findings and views (see above)
iii) WG2 and WG3 are based on the assumption that human induced climate change is real and indeed needs action. I would call this the political part of the IPCC-report since several policies are suggested which to me is outside the scope of science. Many of the contributors are affiliated with WWF, Greenpeace etc. which to me make this part of the IPCC-report less credible. And, among those climate scientists I know they disregard these parts altogether sticking to the WG1.
iv) The SPM (summary for policymakers) is written in parallell without looking at the WG1 draft (Yes its true) meaning that the content in the rest of the report cannot deviate too much from SPM. However, anyone with the slightest scientific training will note the difference between WG1 and SPM. I´d say that some of the conclusions and statements in the final SPM find no support in the WG1-part! (The latest report, AR5, actually downplayed the climate threat by for instance lowering the TCR value by some 30%. TCR = Transient Climate Response ; The value that determines the temperature outcome in the near future)
The IPCC is probably very aware of this. The WG1 part is vast and who has the time to read through it all (well I did) and then also make complaints? What are the chances that anyone would care? One can follow the process on how the text is processed on the IPCC homepage. Most remarks are dismissed by the lead author (=consensus Gate keepers) even though the remarks have serious peer-reviewed references backing up their arguments. Especially so, if the argument doesn't support the AGW theory. (And, yes, these remarks do exist!). That is how you create consensus....
Some voices from scholars on the IPCC and their methods:
1. Dr Robert Balling: "The IPCC notes that "No significant acceleration in the rate of sea level rise during the 20th century has been detected." This did not appear in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers.
2. Dr John Christy: "Little known to the public is the fact that most of the scientists involved with the IPCC do not agree that global warming is occurring. Its findings have been consistently misrepresented and/or politicized with each succeeding report."
3. Dr Judith Curry: "I'm not going to just spout off and endorse the IPCC because I don't have confidence in the process."
4. Dr Robert Davis: "Global temperatures have not been changing as state of the art climate models predicted they would. Not a single mention of satellite temperature observations appears in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers."
5. Dr Willem de Lange: "In 1996 the IPCC listed me as one of approximately 3000 "scientists" who agreed that there was a discernible human influence on climate. I didn't. There is no evidence to support the hypothesis that runaway catastrophic climate change is due to human activities."
6. Dr Peter Dietze: "Using a flawed eddy diffusion model, the IPCC has grossly underestimated the future oceanic carbon dioxide uptake."
7. Dr John Everett: "It is time for a reality check. The oceans and coastal zones have been far warmer and colder than is projected in the present scenarios of climate change. I have reviewed the IPCC and more recent scientific literature and believe that there is not a problem with increased acidification, even up to the unlikely levels in the most-used IPCC scenarios."
8. Dr Eigil Friis-Christensen: "The IPCC refused to consider the sun's effect on the Earth's climate as a topic worthy of investigation. The IPCC conceived its task only as investigating potential human causes of climate change."
9. Dr Vincent Gray: "The [IPCC] climate change statement is an orchestrated litany of lies."
10. Dr Mike Hulme: "Claims such as '2500 of the world's leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate' are disingenuous … The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was only a few dozen."
11. Dr Georg Kaser: "This number [of receding glaciers reported by the IPCC] is not just a little bit wrong, it is far out by any order of magnitude … It is so wrong that it is not even worth discussing."
12. Dr Aynsley Kellow: "I'm not holding my breath for criticism to be taken on board, which underscores a fault in the whole peer review process for the IPCC: there is no chance of a chapter [of the IPCC report] ever being rejected for publication, no matter how flawed it might be."
13. Dr Madhav Khandekar: "I have carefully analysed adverse impacts of climate change as projected by the IPCC and have discounted these claims as exaggerated and lacking any supporting evidence."
14. Dr Hans Labohm: "The alarmist passages in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers have been skewed through an elaborate and sophisticated process of spin-doctoring."
15. Dr Andrew Lacis: "There is no scientific merit to be found in the Executive Summary [of the IPCC report]. The presentation sounds like something put together by Greenpeace activists and their legal department."
16. Dr Chris Landsea: "I cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a [IPCC] process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound."
17. Dr Richard Lindzen: "The IPCC process is driven by politics rather than science. It uses summaries to misrepresent what scientists say and exploits public ignorance."
18. Dr Philip Lloyd: "I am doing a detailed assessment of the IPCC reports and the Summaries for Policy Makers, identifying the way in which the Summaries have distorted the science. I have found examples of a summary saying precisely the opposite of what the scientists said."
19. Dr Martin Manning: "Some government delegates influencing the IPCC Summary for Policymakers misrepresent or contradict the lead authors."
20. Dr Patrick Michaels: "The rates of warming, on multiple time scales, have now invalidated the suite of IPCC climate models. No, the science is not settled."
21. Dr Johannes Oerlemans: "The IPCC has become too political. Many scientists have not been able to resist the siren call of fame, research funding and meetings in exotic places that awaits them if they are willing to compromise scientific principles and integrity in support of the man-made global-warming doctrine."
22. Dr Roger Pielke: "All of my comments were ignored without even a rebuttal. At that point, I concluded that the IPCC Reports were actually intended to be advocacy documents designed to produce particular policy actions, but not a true and honest assessment of the understanding of the climate system."
23. Dr Tom Segalstad: "The IPCC global warming model is not supported by the scientific data."
24. Dr Fred Singer: "Isn't it remarkable that the Policymakers Summary of the IPCC report avoids mentioning the satellite data altogether, or even the existence of satellites — probably because the data show a slight cooling over the last 18 years, in direct contradiction of the calculations from climate models?"
25. Dr Richard Tol: "The IPCC attracted more people with political rather than academic motives. In AR4, green activists held key positions in the IPCC and they succeeded in excluding or neutralising opposite voices."
26. Dr David Wojick: "The public is not well served by this constant drumbeat of alarms fed by computer models manipulated by advocates."
Saturday, August 10, 2019
Fwd: Planet Earth
Steve,I am going to claim that I have researched this issue far more than most people. I have been concerned about this issue for 30 years, and I have tried to find out as much as I could about it.I would refer you to figure 4 on this page: https://www.pnas.org/content/99/7/4167I made a distinction between the long term trend and the short term trend. Throughout geological time, atmospheric CO2 has been on a major decline. The first atmosphere on planet earth had a 42% CO2 level and now we talk about 400 parts per million. Human beings have temporarily reversed this trend. The CO2 level has dropped considerably over the last 40 million years, and the Earth has also cooled considerably over that time. We entered a series of intermittent ice ages about ten million years ago and technically have been in an ice age for the last 2.58 million years.Over the years I have tried to look at the actual data and I have not been impressed. What we have done over a 200-year period has been a small blip on the geological scale.Whereas we are predicted to double the CO2 level to 800 PPM by the year 2100, this is about the time that we predicted to run out of most fossil fuels. The direct effect of atmospheric CO2 is logarithmic, which means that you have to keep doubling it to have the same effect.I think that the whole point will be mute when nuclear fusion comes along in 10 to 20 years.The debate over CO2 boils down to what the Climate Sensitivity is to a doubling of atmospheric CO2. This has everything to do with what the positive feedback is. There is widespread disagreement on these numbers. A great many predictions were saying that the Climate Sensitivity was going to be over 5 degrees celsius which is enough to melt the polar ice caps. Some predictions were as high as 12 degrees. However, the IPPC gives a generally accepted range of 1.5 to 4.5 degrees based on dozens of models and they also give 3 degrees as an average. The reason the iPCC lowered the low end from 2 degrees to 1.5 is that they accepted a paper which got 1.5 degrees as the climate sensitivity from 20nth century data. I noticed over decades that predictions keep getting revised downward. Very recently, I have been seeing a movement to prevent us from rising 2 degrees by the year 2100, claiming that we can limit this to 1.5 degrees with the very catchy slogan "half a degree makes a difference." This is like they are admitting that the Climate Sensitivity is only 2 degrees. Maybe half a degree does make a difference, but I saw recently that someone was proposing that we spend 122 trillion dollars to prevent this half a degree difference, which is just absurd.There is an overlap between what the climate alarmists and the climate skeptics believe. Everybody agrees that the direct effect of doubling atmospheric CO2 level is a 1.1 increase atmospheric temperature. However, there is much disagreement over how much effect the feedbacks will have, which is why there are widespread predictions on what the Climate Sensitivity is. I saw one climate scientist claim that there is a 60% feedback. However, the climate skeptics make predictions of Climate Sensitivity from .55 to 2.3 degrees, with most skeptics thinking that it is around 2 degrees. It appears to me that the skeptics and the alarmists aren't as far as apart as they used to be.Many skeptics have pointed out that the temperature will vary by 30 degrees celsius in a single day, so they don't consider 2 degrees to be a major problem. There are very legitimate scientists who think that climate threat has been exaggerated.Almost everybody is using the year 1880 as their starting point because that is presumably when accurate records were kept. During that time the CO2 level has gone from 290.8 Parts per Million to 410 PPM. (https://www.co2.earth/daily-co2) Most sites are reporting a temperature increase of less than 1-degree celsius since 1880. Something that I noticed is that since 1880 the average temperature increase has been less than 1/100th of a degree per year and the CO2 change has been less than 1 part per million per year. In past years when I tried to look at actual data, I did some calculation and got 2.3 degrees as the Climate Sensitivity.I have always qualified my remarks by saying that I would like to see where the data takes us going forward.If you deleted the United States completely, the net effect on temperature by the year 2100 would only be about a tenth of a degree, because other countries like China are the major contributors. China builds more coal plants every three years than what exists in the United States.In past years I wrote the following. Although wordy, I think that it has important points, although I have already made most of them.Best wishes,John Coffey
The numbers are not very impressive. Since 1880, which is the measure most people use, on average the CO2 level has gone up less than 1 part per million per year and the temperature has gone up less than 1/100th of a degree celsius per year. You could argue that since about 1970 things have accelerated a little, but a little less than double. The temperature went up on average of 0.016 degrees celsius pear year. It is going take a very long time to reach the five degrees needed to melt the polar ice caps, which are according to every source going to take 5,000 years to melt. Meanwhile we will be out of most fossil fuels by the year 2100 and coal will be gone by the 2150. The only thing that will save us from running out of energy will be nuclear fusion, which fortunately is not that far off.
The amount of carbon on planet Earth by definition remains pretty much the same. Man has been burning fossil fuels, which puts carbon into the atmosphere. Where did the carbon in the fossil fuels come from? It mostly came from plants and bacteria that got buried underground due to geological processes. Over millions of years natural processes turned the plants and bacteria into fossil fuels. Where did the plants and bacteria get their carbon from? They got it from the atmosphere. The carbon that we are now putting into the atmosphere originally came from the atmosphere.
To better understand this, we have to understand the complete history of atmospheric carbon dioxide on planet Earth. The original earth atmosphere was an amazing 42% carbon dioxide compared with the roughly .04% that we have now. That original atmosphere had so much pressure that it could crush a man flat. About 2.5 billion years ago, cyanobacteria began using photosynthesis to convert carbon dioxide into free oxygen, which lead to the creation of our oxygen rich "third atmosphere" 2.3 billion years ago. At that time the carbon dioxide levels were about 7,000 parts per million, but it went into a somewhat steady but uneven decline because geological processes would sequester carbon underground. The decline was uneven because as part of the "carbon dioxide cycle", sometimes geological processes like volcanoes would cause massive amounts of carbon dioxide to be released back into the atmosphere.
Thirty million years ago during the Oligocene Epoch, the average temperature of the earth was about 7 degrees Celsius warmer than it is now. There was no ice on the poles, but the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was in rapid decline during this epoch. About 23 million years ago, at the beginning of the Neogene period, ice began to form on the poles. About ten million years ago, a series of intermittent ice ages began that continue to this day. I found one source that said that we are still technically in an ice age because we still have ice at the poles.
These ice ages helped create human evolution. The ice ages caused Africa to dry up which lead to some deforestation. This forced some arboreal (tree-dwelling) apes to venture onto land. About 7 million years ago, the first apes that could comfortably walk upright appeared. They had evolved a new type of pelvis that allowed upright locomotion, which is about three times more efficient when trying to cross land.
The first tool making ape that resembled modern humans, Homo habilis, arose 2.5 million years ago. It would be soon followed by Homo erectus, and then about 200,000 years ago, modern humans, Homo sapiens would arise. However, Homo sapiens almost died out. About 50,000 years ago an ice age in Europe had caused Africa to almost completely dry up. The total human population had dropped to 7,000 individuals living on the southern coast of Africa. During this period humans learned how to fish, make new tools, and create permanent dwellings. When the ice age abated, these humans with their new tools spread out to rest of the world at a pace of about a mile per year. This was the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic (Late Stone Age) period.
More ice ages would follow, and during each ice age human population would decline. It is no coincidence that all of human civilization (i.e. agriculture, use of metals) would arise during a "brief" warm period between two ice ages starting about 10,000 years ago. I have heard that no matter what we do, we will enter a new ice age in about 10,000 years from now, but I have also heard speculation that the next ice age will be delayed by global warming. This actually should be our goal, since humans have always declined during the ice ages and always prospered during the intermittent warm periods.
During the geological time period of the earth, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been on an uneven decline and mostly disappeared. Atmospheric carbon dioxide is necessary for plant growth, and I have read that we were running dangerously low on atmospheric carbon dioxide, about 00.02%, before mankind at least temporarily reversed the trend. I just read a wikipedia article that said that atmospheric carbon dioxide will eventually get so low that all plants and animals will die off. What mankind has done is put carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere that was previously there, thus possibly delaying the next ice age. Currently the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is about 00.04%.
Carbon dioxide by itself cannot cause significant global warming. There are diminished returns. Carbon dioxide has to double again to produce the same effect as the last doubling. The effect is not linear but logarithmic. What the alarmists are worried about, and they could be correct, is positive feedback. The warming of the earth causes more water vapor to enter the atmosphere, and water vapor is a much stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, thus causing more warming. If this were true, however, the last warming period around the year 2000 should caused a continuous positive feedback, a runaway greenhouse, which didn't happen. Instead temperatures went into a major decline and hit a really big low point in the year 2007.
The skeptics believe that increased cloud cover reflects sunlight back into space thus causing a negative feedback. The skeptics are not "global warming deniers", which is a pejorative phrase used by global warming theorists to make the skeptics sound like holocaust deniers. These skeptics actually believe in global warming. At least, the legitimate skeptical scientists do. They just think that global warming is happening at a rate slower than predicted by the theorists. I can point you to an article that shows that the positive feedback models have been contradicted by the actual temperature data, which in reality has been closer to the negative feedback models.
The worst case scenario is that the polar ice caps will melt. If that happens we will lose some coastlines and all of Florida due to sea level rise. However, according to what I just read, it will take 5,000 years for the polar ice caps to melt. In other words, these are processes that take a very long time to happen. In this century we are only looking at modest temperature increases. In the meantime, humans are very adaptable. We are only five to ten years away from creating the first workable prototypes of nuclear fusion. It might take 25 years for this to be practical, but at that point if we wanted to get rid of fossil fuels altogether, we could. I think that we will also see advances in solar power, which is already happening, and battery technology to store the energy created by solar. In other words, we have it within our means to avoid any possible disasters that might be coming.
--
Best wishes,
John Coffey
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Steve
Date: Sat, Aug 10, 2019 at 3:00 PM
Subject: Re: Planet Earth
To: John CoffeyUnfortunately the preponderance of scientific evidence is on my side. And I will take the data and analysis of the UN and NASA over your own. We simply aren't going to agree here again.Quite obviously the first atmosphere, while being formed by volcanic activity, would have contained higher levels of carbon dioxide. And of course there have been times when there had been higher global temperatures than current. Just not in human experience.The fact that most life occurs near water is also important, as ice continues fall from Antarctica. The amount of devastation to global life will be considerable, and is practically unavoidable, we will see begin seeing climate refugees within a decade. There is also the clear fact that climate change is among us already. Wildfires, droughts, superstorm, these are all at record levels.If humanity does survive we will never be the same.Ultimately John, I am done having the argument with people whether or not climate change exists and the dangers of it, or whether or not we have played a role. I can entertain discussion about what can be done about it, but the answer seems to be very little.This is another thing we just aren't going to see eye to eye on, I suggest we move on. The only reason I felt the need to respond is that you've gone on similar lines before and I think you have to be well aware of my position.
Friday, August 9, 2019
Planet Earth
I think about things that maybe most people wouldn't worry about. We live in a violent universe. Earth recently had a near-miss with a bus-sized asteroid that could have wiped out a major city with a ten megaton blast. However, chances are it would have just exploded over an ocean someplace. It is unlikely to hit a city. However, there are also more asteroids out there.
The last time the supervolcano in Yellowstone National Park erupted 640,000 years ago, it destroyed life in several nearby states. By comparison, this makes the asteroid look like small potatoes. These explosions are so big they create their own weather over hundreds of miles. We are "overdue" for another eruption, which could wipe out half the country, but the experts say that it will not happen any time soon. I heard that NASA is trying to find a way to relieve some of the pressure below the park.
In 535 AD, multiple volcanic eruptions, and possibly a supervolcano, blackened out the sky everywhere on earth, creating an 18-month winter.
A couple of times in Earth's history the whole planet froze solid with a layer of ice a mile thick.
Over hundreds of millions of years, there have been several mass extinctions on planet Earth. At least one may have been caused by a gamma-ray burst. Gamma-ray bursts are massive amounts of deadly radiation from space given off by black hole formation. Although such events hitting Earth are extremely rare, they have the potential to wipe out all life on Earth.
The Earth was hit by an object the size of the planet Mars 4.5 billion years ago. This is how we got the Moon, which is made of material from the Earth's crust.
These catastrophic events are fortunately very rare.
We have been technically living in an ice age for 2.5 million years. There have been several periods of massive glaciation in human history. These usually had devastating effects on the human population. The human race was almost wiped out 50,000 years ago. All of human civilization, such as farming, writing, working with metals, building cities, occurred during a "brief" 10,000 year warm period after the last period of glaciation. We have been fortunate to live in a "brief" time of very stable climate. No matter what humans do with CO2, and we are going to run out of fossil fuels in 100 years anyway, we expect another period of glaciation 10,00 years from now.
The Earth's orbit around the sun is not entirely stable. The slow precession of the orbit causes dramatic effects on the climate.
Although you could argue that rising CO2 is an issue in the short run, over the long term the decline of CO2 has been very dramatic and looks very bleak. Over the last 40 million years atmospheric CO2 levels have been in a nosedive. This is because natural processes sequester CO2 in the ground. During the last period of glaciation, CO2 levels got down to a record low of 180 parts per million, which is just barely above the level where all terrestrial plants die off from a lack of CO2. If humans are around for another 10,000 years then we will have to deal with this problem.
Sunday, August 4, 2019
Fwd: Mosquitos change everything
How Mosquitoes Changed Everything
They slaughtered our ancestors and derailed our history. And they're not finished with us yet.
From: John Coffey <john2001plus@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Aug 7, 2018 at 8:43 PM
Subject: Let's Kill All The Mosquitoes! No, really.
To:
Monday, July 29, 2019
Thursday, July 25, 2019
Thor 4: Love and Thunder: Natalie Portman, female Thor
https://www.cnet.com/news/thor-4-love-and-thunder-natalie-portman-female-thor-lgbtq-character-plot-release-date/
Almost every time they do something like this, they lose money. They give us movies that people don't want to see.
Wednesday, July 24, 2019
Tuesday, July 23, 2019
Just Plain Racist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfs3SSNB6rI
Race is not a scientific concept. It is just something we made up.
Sunday, July 21, 2019
Saturday, July 20, 2019
Tuesday, July 16, 2019
Monday, July 15, 2019
Trump and Tweets
Friday, July 12, 2019
Wednesday, July 10, 2019
Friday, July 5, 2019
Saturday, June 29, 2019
From my friend Douglas Taffinder
We grew up in a time when most everyone treated each other with respect. We didn't eat out much just once in awhile when mom & dad took us out for a treat. We drank homemade Kool-Aid, ate peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, hot dogs, but mostly home made meals consisting of a lot of grilled cheese, hamburgers and spaghetti. Our treat was homemade chocolate chip cookies.
We grew up during a time when it was simple. We went outside to play. We couldn't wait to get home from school and "change" into our play clothes, because you didn't play in school clothes, because they were so full of dirt and who knows what else. We were not afraid to play outside and get dirty, if you were so clean you didn't NEED to take a bath, yup a bath, showers were something people had in hotels attached to the tube there..
We played ball, rode bikes, Big wheels,climbed trees, built forts, jumped rope, kick ball, Jax, played football at the neighborhood playground, kick the can, always played outside till dark. You never feared going to school, never had to prepare for a shooting. You never played inside the house, or even had snacks between meals. A time when there was no bottled water and we turned on the hose to get a drink. No cable t.v., just 3 or so channels with an antenna on the roof, no remote controls, no cell phones, no internet, or YouTube. A landline phone we had to dial with a 5 foot cord is all we knew. And we shared it with everybody in the house. And if you had a friend more than 5 miles away well that's long distance. So forget it. Start writing a letter.
Friends were kids who lived near you and you could walk to each other's house, and did multiple times a day.. If you wanted to play with one of your friends you would go to the house stand on the sidewalk and yell there name until either they came running out, or their parent came out and said "No not today", at which time you dropped your head and hashed our PLAN B, because going back home and sitting in the house was the LAST thing you wanted to do, that was what you did ONLY when you got into trouble or you where sick!! Both were torture because you could sit in your window and see your friends outside having fun "without you"!!We watched some cartoons on Saturday morning. But they were taken away if on restriction. If you were bad in school, you got in trouble in school and when you got home you got in trouble again, because your parents already knew. We would ride bikes for hours and talk until the street lights came on, because that was your "curfew". You could trust your neighbors. You felt safe.
You LEARNED from your parents instead of disrespecting them and treating them as if they knew nothing. Parents took pride in being honest and having a strong work ethic. We were taught to respect guns, authority, elders, and America. We never thought about taking a life, or being inhumane to animals. We all ate around the dinner table and talked to each other as a family when possible.
We asked each other how their day was and talked about what we learned in school. We said the Pledge of Allegiance and listened to our teachers, and respected them. We watched what we said around our elders because we knew If we DISRESPECTED any grown up we would get our behinds busted, it wasn't called abuse, IT WAS CALLED DISCIPLINE! We held doors, carried groceries and gave up our seat without being asked, to someone who needed it.
You didn't hear curse words on the radio in songs or TV. "Please" and "Thank you" were part of our daily vocabulary! And "Bless you" if someone sneezed, even strangers and NO ONE was offended by the term..
Re-post if you're thankful for your childhood and will never forget where you came from! Wouldn't it be nice if it were possible to get back to this way of life? It was so primitive, yet we all miss it??
Copy and paste... change to the Town where you lived. Lots of good time and memories...the good ol' days.
Learn to RESPECT not EXPECT!