As medium-term global average atmospheric temperature trends continue to diverge sharply from predictions based on global warming alarmists' hypotheses about CO2's warming effect, climate feedbacks, and computer models expressing those hypotheses, the alarmists have increasingly turned to other reasons for pursuing the economic (especially energy) policies they prefer: "weather weirding," "extreme weather," ocean "acidification," "coral bleaching," species extinction, and particularly … [Read more...]
Getting Down to Nitty Gritty: Why Wind and Solar Threaten Electricity Grids and People’s Health and Safety
Rud Istvan has a very instructive article at Judith Curry's Climate Etc. blog about the challenges of bring wind and solar power into use through electricity grids. Bottom line: Their intermittency greatly increases the costs of electricity while reducing its reliability, bringing threats to people's health and safety wherever they begin to make up a significant percentage of total power supplied to the grid. The higher the renewable penetration, the greater this intermittency burden becomes. … [Read more...]
New Observational Evidence Supports Old “Infrared Iris” Theory
About seven years ago I read a fascinating paper by Roy Spencer et al. that argued that clouds respond to Earth's surface temperatures in ways that moderate them--cooling the surface in response to warming, warming it in response to cooling. It led me to an earlier paper by Richard Lindzen that argued that, at least in a major region above the Pacific, clouds respond to surface temperature changes in a way analogous to how the human eye's iris responds to light. In response to dimmer light, the … [Read more...]
