Category: energy

Climate Politics Abroad Are Turning Decidedly Skeptical

by H. Stirling Burnett, PhD

[This article is a reprint from the Climate Change Weekly, #322, with the permission of the author/editor of that periodical.  The Climate Change Weekly is published by the Heartland Institute.  The original article is available here.  This article should be of particular interest to our forum in light of the recent discussions regarding progress, or lack thereof, in getting the skeptical point of view out to the general populace.  One might conclude from this article that the skeptical community with help from climate economics may be seeing more success in changing minds than we might have thought.  Ed.]

H. STERLING BURNETT Contact: [email protected] 214-909-2368

From Alberta to Australia, from Finland to France and beyond, voters are increasingly showing their displeasure with expensive energy policies imposed by politicians in an inane effort to fight purported human-caused climate change.

Skepticism about whether humans are causing dangerous climate change has always been higher in the United States than in most industrialized countries. As a result, governments in Europe, Canada, and in other developed countries are much farther along the energy-rationing path that cutting carbon dioxide emissions requires than the United States is.
Residents in these countries have begun to revolt against the higher energy costs they suffer under as a result of ever-increasing taxes on fossil fuels Continue reading “Climate Politics Abroad Are Turning Decidedly Skeptical”

An Analysis of the Grisham Energy Plan

by David Tofsted
Candidate NM House, District 36

[David Tofsted, CASF member and a candidate for the NM House of Representatives in NM District 36, has also posted a similar analysis of the Grisham Energy Plan on his own web site at this link. Ed.]

SUMMARY:

Contained herein is a preliminary attempt to bound the cost of the proposed Grisham Energy Plan. This plan calls for renewable power in New Mexico to account for 50% of all electrical power used by 2030, and increases that to 80% by 2040. The current document attempts to assess the costs of the Grisham plan by three different methods, and by employing two sets of

Photo by Pixabay

assumptions for one of the methods. The metric used for assessing cost was the surcharge to the average NM household yearly electric bill. In each case the cost per household was found to be on the order of just over one thousand to several thousands of dollars of added expense per year over the full 20 years of the plan.

The lowest estimate obtained was $1,500. The high estimate was  approximately $6,653. The remaining two estimates were $3,200 and $6,000. Based on the variability of assumptions and range of estimates it is Continue reading “An Analysis of the Grisham Energy Plan”

Is Earth in Energy Deficit?

The concept of ‘missing heat’ implies that a surplus of energy exists to be missed. And the NASA GISS Model E projects a trend of increasing energy surplus.

 

[This post on earth's energy budget analysis origninally appeared on Judith Curry's web site and was authored by CASF member, Steve McGee,in 2013.  We have added it to this site as part of our archive.  Posted on November 28, 2013 | 673 Comment]

by Steve McGee

Unlike many fiscal budgets, earth’s energy budget is widely believed to be in surplus.

With each year of increasing amounts of greenhouse gasses, earth is modeled to send less energy outward than it receives from the sun. This energy surplus, as understood, continues until the global average temperature rises sufficiently to restore balance by emitting more energy in accordance with the Stefan-Boltzmann Law. Indeed, the concept of ‘missing heat’ implies that a surplus of energy exists to be missed. And the NASA GISS Model E projects a trend of increasing energy surplus. The runs of Model E for “Dangerous Human-Made Interference” (from 2007) A1B scenario ( available at  link) yield this projection for net radiance at the top of the atmosphere:

GISS_Dangerous_LatTime

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Notice the increasing trend of anomalous net radiance.

With this in mind, but on another matter I recently examined the Climate Forecast System Reanalysis. The CFSR is a newer reanalysis described by Saha, Suranjana, and Coauthors, in 2010: The NCEP Climate Forecast System Reanalysis. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 91, 1015.1057. doi: 10.1175/2010BAMS3001.1

The CFSR monthly data sets are available at [link].

The CFSR is the first reanalysis from NCEP to use radiance observations from the menagerie of past satellites. The CFSR also uses the AER RRTM radiative model to fill in the gaps of satellite data. The RRTM is the same radiative code used by many climate models. By subtracting the top of the atmosphere outgoing infrared from the net shortwave radiative flux, one arrives at the net radiative flux. And by dividing the outgoing shortwave radiative flux by the incoming shortwave radiative flux, one arrives at albedo. Examples for March of 1979 appear as:

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Due to missing values, all data for the year 1994 are excluded. By calculating the spatially weighted global annual averages, the time series of various fields yield interesting results. The data for the top of the atmosphere net radiance appear as:

AnnualCFS_NRAD

The CFSR Net Radiance data indicate radiative deficit following the El Chichon volcanic eruption in 1982, and again following the Mount Pinatubo volcanic eruption in 1991. Also, the peak net radiative surplus appears during 1997 which coincides with the anomalously warm El Nino event. I was quite surprised, however, to note that the years 2001 through 2008 indicate net radiative deficit and that the overall trend was toward decreasing net radiance.

Should I have been surprised? Perhaps not. Net radiation, particularly the shortwave component, is known to be quite difficult to measure because shortwave reflection varies greatly with respect to the angle of observation  depending upon the composition, size, shape, and orientation of clouds and earth’s surface. Further, the very process of reanalysis can add spurious errors. That is why NCAR ( the National Center for Atmospheric Research ) warns that reanalysis should not be equated with “observations” or “reality.”

Still, while not “observation” nor “reality”, the CFSR does represent a best assessment of  the recent climate based on observations and the same radiative codes that lie within the prognostic climate mod

So what does this imply?

To the extent that the CFSR radiance is accurate, it implies that earth was in radiative deficit, not surplus, for the decade of the 2000s and that for this decade, there is no ‘missing heat’ to be found.

The negative trend in CFSR net radiation implies a divergence from the NASA GISS model projections cited above.

The CFSR net radiative deficit also implies that energy loss to space, rather than shifting of energy within the climate system may be responsible for the negative trend since 2001 in many of the global temperature data sets.

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Biosketch:  Steve McGee has a bachelor of science degree in meteorology. His long career of software engineering includes the development of numerous defense related systems providing analysis and display weather and atmospheric effects.