The main justification for a Carbon Tax has been that it is necessary in order to make lower-carbon technologies competitive with coal and gas. However, recent persuasive demonstrations of copious energy generation from a new technology based on a non-carbon nickel/hydrogen system show just how wrong this assumption is. A significant announcement today from Defkalion, the on-off business partner of Rossi, indicates full production might be immanent. The technological breakthrough of LENR Read more [...] none

Wow. Herman Cain is now 20% in front of his nearest GOP rival Mitt Romney. That's 10% up in the last week. His message. 9-9-9. 999 is the emergency number for a number of countries (but not the US where the number is 911). Herman Cain has a degree in mathematics. Cain’s 9-9-9 video concludes with text saying, “If 10% is good enough for God, then 9% should be just fine for the Federal Government.” Praised by supporters for both its simplicity and its specificity, Cain’s Read more [...] one

With the Carbon Tax legislation up for a vote on Wednesday, this is a critical week. Skeptics should embrace the challenge of communicating common-sense and logic over Green ideology. I feel strongly we should not give up, wave a white flag and surrender. Every week there are more reasons not to pass this legislation. The global temperature continues not to rise. The ocean heat remains stable. Global warming appears to have peaked. More research is published showing flaws in previous studies Read more [...] 2 com

Here is the text of Rossi's appeal, following up from the Oct. 6 test: “The E-Cat basic module “for the People”, that we will put in commerce within months, will be 40 cm long, 40 cm large, 40 cm high, will weight 60 kg, the shape of a cube. I need a design cheap ( I want to put it in commerce at a price of 500 euros per kW) but nice, very nice. I will buy the design which I will choose and everybody has my honour word that I will not use designs not paid. I need it within two months. Read more [...] none

Menzies House reports on the latest efforts to suppress opposition to the Carbon Tax, as around 4500 Australians opposed to the carbon tax have had their submissions to the Joint Select Committee on Australia's Clean Energy Future Legislation rejected out of hand. The 4500 number was stated by Senator Birmingham on his website: This rushed 'shotgun' inquiry received more than 4500 emails in barely a week, but in an extraordinary abuse of democratic process the Labor-Greens majority opted Read more [...] 4 com

Paraphrasing Steve Jobs -- reasons not to pursue renewables: 1. Anti-environment. Increasing the concentration of generation allows larger areas of land to be retained in their natural state. In contrast, harvesting of land for biomass, wind or solar or energy damages more land. Advocates of renewable energy damn the natural environment with ugly, dangerous solar and wind structures. 2. Backwards. The progress of civilization is characterized by the utilization of denser, more intense energy Read more [...] 9 com

The NyTeknik Rossi report, translated to English. As in previous tests, the start-up was effected by heating the E-cat with an electrical resistor at about 2.7 kilowatts, this time for about four hours, in order to achieve, according to Rossi, sufficient stability. The power to the resistor was then switched off, and the reactor functioned in self sustained mode for about three and a half hours, with no measurable signs of decrease (see detailed report and temperature data). The Read more [...] 2 com

Initial reports of the ongoing test of Rossi's ECat in Italy are positive. The 1MW unit was also on display. Having followed this story from the beginning, maintaining The Future is not Green, but Grey I congratulate Mr Rossi and all involved. Lets see, some likely, and not so likely, predictions: There will be a massive fire-sale of renewable energy products that have been underwritten by Government spending of billions of dollars, as it plays an decreasingly important role in Australia's Read more [...] 3 com

Staying up following the twitter feed of Rossi's event here by Daniele Passerini (http://22passi.blogspot.com). Its in Italian, but if you subscribe in Google Reader, it will be translated. 10:08pm 22passi: Reactor self-sufficiency! More info: http://peswiki.com/index.php/News:Real-Time_Updates_on_the_October_6%2C_2011_E-Cat_Test Wired is first: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-10/06/e-cat-cold-fusion none

How often do you feel like this when you ship? Rest in peace, bro'. Read more [...] none

The upcoming test of Rossi's reactor is scheduled for Oct 6th at the University of Bologna, Italy, the oldest continuously operating university in the world. The calorimetry will be more rigorous than before. There will be a primary steam loop, a heat exchanger, and a secondary flowing water loop. The reactor will be run in heat after death mode for extended periods. If things go according to plan, this will be much better than previous tests, and may be definitive. If so, we will Read more [...] 5 com

This one has an Australian flavor: Read more [...] none

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 [...] 5 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

The NIPCC - Interim Report 2011 updates their last 2009 Report, with an overview of the research on climate change that the IPCC did not see fit to print. Its published by the Heartland Institute with lead authors Craig D. Idso, Australian Robert Carter, and S. Fred Singer with a number of other significant contributions. I am grateful for inclusion of some of my work in Chapter 6 on the uncertainty of the range-shift method for modeling biodiversity under climate change. The controversy Read more [...] 5 com

The New Zealand Climate Conversation Group have released their report and reanalysis of the NIWA 7-Station Review. CCG claim NIWA misrepresented the statistical techniques it used, and exaggerated warming over the last hundred years. The CCG results (Figure 20 above) prove there are real problems in the adjustments to temperature measurements for moves and equipment changes in NZ (also seen in Australia). As any trained scientist or engineer knows, failure to follow a well-documented Read more [...] 2 com

Congratulations Julia and Wayne, on your new milestone - Australia's National debt has topped $200 billion after Labor borrowing $100 million per day. Australia now has its largest debt in history, after we borrowed $3.2 billion over the last week. On 11 March 2009, Treasurer Wayne Swan invoked "special circumstances" to increase the debt ceiling to a "temporary" level of $200 billion. In the last budget the government has increased the debt ceiling permanently to $250 billion. See the Total Read more [...] 3 com

Richard Treadgold from the New Zealand Climate Conversation Group reports on the Statistical Audit of the NIWA 7-Station Review, claiming that New Zealand's National Climate Center, NIWA, misrepresented the statistical techniques it used (Rhoades & Salinger - Adjustment of temperature and rainfall records for site changes) in order to fabricate strong warming over the last hundred years. NIWA shows 168% more warming than Rhoades & Salinger – the method NIWA betrayed. The blue dashed Read more [...] 3 com

You have probably heard about Steve Jobs retirement from CEO at Apple. If like me, you find him an inspiration, you might enjoy this video from the Apple Music Event in 2001, "The First Ever iPod Introduction". What I like is the steel-trap logic, the "quantum leap" vision, the love of speed, the sparse visuals, and the impeccable timing of the delivery. Read more [...] one

Lag or phase relationships are to me one of the most convincing pieces of evidence for the accumulative theory. The solar cycle varies over 11 years on average like a sine wave. This property can be used to probe contribution of total solar insolation (TSI) to global temperature. Above is a plot of two linear regression models of the HadCRU global temperature series since 1950. The time since 1950 is chosen because it is the period that the IPCC states that most of the warming has been Read more [...] 7 com

The point of this post is to show a calculation by guest, Pochas, of the decay time that should be expected from the accumulation of heat in the mixed layer of the ocean. I realized this prediction gives another test of the accumulation theory of climate change, that potentially explains high climate sensitivity to variations in solar forcing, without recourse to feedbacks, or greenhouse gasses, in more detail here and here. The analysis is based on the most important parameter in all dynamic Read more [...] 16 com

When the MSM reports on the commercialization of Ni-H cold fusion energy generation, they see parallels to the scientific treatment of AGW sceptics, citing "follow the money". If this new technology is real, it should be easy to prove and past failures - and outside agendas - shouldn’t stand in the way. Still, scientific discovery is expensive and money is often the X factor. Fortunes and reputations are made and lost based on results. Orthodoxies develop that discredit ideas posing a threat Read more [...] 3 com