Which is better for the environment: renewable energies, oil, gas, coal or nuclear energy? The environmental damage caused by energy sources can be measured by their 'footprint' -- the area required to produce a specific amount of energy. An article in Forbes lists the energy produced per unit area of major energy sources, from which I have calculated the area required to produce a specific amount of energy. SourceW/m2m2/W Biofuels0.0520 Wind power1.20.8 Solar PV6.70.15 Natural Read more [...] 3 com

Nir Shaviv is an astrophysicist who wrote some of the more interesting studies showing the role of Gamma Ray Flux (GRF) on climate change, now belatedly being acknowledged by the climate establishment. He gives some advice to students here: Stay away from Climate Science until you are tenured or retired! My point is that because climate science is so dogmatic students do risk burning themselves because of the politics, if they don’t follow the party line. Since doing bad (“alarmist”) Read more [...] one

Sea levels, recently updated with 10 new data-points, reinforce the hiatus described as a 'pothole' by Josh Willis of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., who says you can blame the pothole on the cycle of El Niño and La Niña in the Pacific: This temporary transfer of large volumes of water from the oceans to the land surfaces also helps explain the large drop in global mean sea level. But they also expect the global mean sea level to begin climbing again. Attributing the Read more [...] 7 com

Rossi revealed on his blog site that The Customer is a person and not a corporation. Andrea Rossi September 24th, 2011 at 10:46 AM Dear Simon Knight: By half October we will explain exactly what follows: 1- where the 1 MW plant will be tested 2- all the (not confidential) characteristics of the 1MW plant (the complementary part is more reactors, of a new type that in the meantime we have developed) 3- possibly, who is the Customer, if the Customer will allow us to communicate his name. The Read more [...] 4 com

Here is Rossi's 1MW plant consisting of 52 individual E-Cats mounted in a shipping container, reported by NyTechNik. Above is a video tour of the 1MW plant. A successful trial in October will prove beyond doubt a clean nuclear energy with at least a tenth of the cost of fossil fuels, without emissions of greenhouse gasses. It will demonstrate, once again, the folly of governments trying to pick winners, such as the billions of dollars directed at renewable energy that will never deliver Read more [...] 3 com

It was shown here that the phase shift between total solar irradiance and global temperature is exactly one quarter of the solar cycle, 90 degrees, or 2.75 years. This is a prediction of the accumulation theory described here and here that shows how solar variation can account for paleo and recent temperature change. Phase shifts in the short-wave (SW) side of the climate system are erroneously attributed to 'thermal inertia' of the ocean and earth mass, and called 'lags', or regarded as non-existent. Read more [...] 13 com

This is the application of the work-in-progress Fast Fourier Transform algorithm by Bart coded in R on the total solar irradiance (TSI via Lean 2000) and global temperature (HadCRU). The results show (PDF) that the atmosphere is sufficiently sensitive to variations in solar insolation for these to cause recent (post 1950) warming and paleowarming. The mechanism, suggested by the basic energy balance model, but confirmed by the plots below, is accumulation. That is, global temperature is not Read more [...] 8 com

Starting the S&B story at the beginning, as did Steve McIntyre, with Dessler 2010 in Science, I'll put a new spin on the satellite data uploaded by Steve, using the accumulation theory. Although I am not familiar with the data, it turns out to be easily interpretable. In black is the replication of Steve's Figure 1 and Dessler's 2010 Figure 2A, the scatter plot of monthly average values of ∆R_cloud (eradr) versus ∆T_s (erats) using CERES and ECMWF interim data. There is extremely little Read more [...] 4 com

Here are a few more phase plots of global temperature after the impulse of stratosphere-reaching eruptions, Mt Agung, Mt Chichon and Mt Pinatubo in 1963, 1982 and 1991 respectively. The impulses are cooling of course, due to the shielding of short-wave solar radiation by stratospheric aerosols. The tendency of the global temperature dynamic to oscillate around a mean is clear. These patterns were then disrupted by large El Ninos. The axes of the phase space are chosen to represent Read more [...] 2 com

A dynamic way of looking at global temperature is to plot it in phase space, which is usually with the position on the x axis and velocity on the y axis. Below is the phase space graph of global temperature since 1996 with temperature on the x axis and change in temperature on the y axis. The graph of position versus velocity displays an inward spiral. In classical mechanics, this is described as an "attractor" and shows that the system is trapped in a potential well from which it cannot Read more [...] 5 com