Science and Environmental Policy Project's The Week That Was: February 17, 2024

b"The Week That Was: 2024-02-17"

b"Brought to You by SEPP (www.SEPP.org)"

b"The Science and Environmental Policy Project"

b"Quote of the Week: “There is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science [pseudoscience].. …It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty — a kind of leaning over backwards.” – Richard Feynman"

b"Number of the Week: 63 hours, 45 minutes"

b"THIS WEEK:"

b"By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project"

b"(SEPP)"

b"Scope: This TWTW focuses on the above quote from Richard Feynman to distinguish cargo cult [pseudoscience] from the integrity and utter honesty needed for realistic physical science. Howard Hayden discusses the failure of the IPCC to check its findings against the Stefan-Boltzmann law. A group of scientists, largely from China, present evidence that, in part, the warming for the past thirty-five years may have come from a changing of Earth’a1e;s albedo. Ole Humlum presents the state of the climate until January 2024. The CO2 Coalition presents a climate report for Wyoming, emphasizing the benefits of increasing CO2. And Stephen McIntyre presents some glaring deficiencies in the IPCC process leading to its Assessment Reports."

b"*******Check Your Work: Using the Sixth Assessment Report"

b"(AR6, 2021) of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change"

b(IPCC), AMO physicist Howard Hayden demonstrates that AR6 is inconsistent with itself and with the Stefan-Boltzmann law which specifies the amount of radiation emitted per unit of time from a specific area of a blackbody."

b"Just as light entering a cavity through a hole is entirely absorbed, a blackbody is an idealized physical body that absorbs all electromagnetic radiation hitting it. A perfect absorber is also a perfect emitter. For example, a hole in a very hot ceramic tube emits visible light in a full-color spectrum that is determined entirely by the temperature, not the characteristics of the chemicals in the ceramic. The temperatures of stars are determined by their blackbody spectrum. Cooler bodies, including such things as a block of dry ice, also emit a blackbody spectrum. In all cases, the amount of radiant energy emitted is proportional to the fourth power of its temperature in Kelvin. The Stefan-Boltzmann law is embodied in the operation of thermal cameras and ear thermometers."

b"Yet, the authors of AR6 ignore the need to check its work against this fundamental law of physics and so do the authors of the US Fifth National Climate Assessment (2023). In the February Energy Advocate Hayden writes: “Sometimes it is a good idea to refer to a truth that everybody can understand regardless of their scientific background. There are infrared thermometers and thermal imaging cameras on the market, and they must rely on some known relationship between temperature and the amount of IR that bodies emit. That relationship is, of course, embodied in a mathematical formula, and even if you don’t know what the formula is, you can easily recognize that such a formula exists. It even has a name: the Stefan-Boltzmann law.Now, suppose that you were a climate scientist whose job it is to model the climate when the atmosphere has more CO2 because of humanity’s combustion of coal, oil, and natural gas. Your computer model predicts some temperature rise for some given scenario. You then publish your results. What did you miss?The Stefan-Boltzmann (S-B) law has a trivial result for small increases in the temperature of the earth. For each 1ºC temperature rise, the surface must emit about 5.5 W/m2 more heat. If you did not apply that Stefan-Boltzmann law to your result, you were negligent. A science journal refereed or not, that published the model result without that calculation is also negligent. Suffice it to say that the IPCC has never—repeat NEVER—applied the S-B law to their predicted temperatures."

b"It is a very simple matter to append an IR emission scale to every temperature scale, as shown in Figure 1 [Not shown here, see reference in Challenging the Orthodoxy]. However, you will search in vain for such a scale, as the IPCC—and all of its references—have failed to apply the S-B law."

b"Yet, everything we read about the ‘climate crisis’, &#