Look At It This Way (#LAITW)

Let’s try a little thought experiment. Einstein used thought experiments to uncover many of the discoveries he made.

It’s about face-coverings for COVID. Picture yourself wearing a typical face mask. You know it doesn’t make a really good seal between you and the open air because if it did you’d asphyxiate. So how good a seal does it make?

For starters, just observe a lot of face masks in action. Are the nose AND mouth covered? Are there gaps between the circumference of the mask and the wearer’s skin? Can you picture air getting out of any of those gaps?

OK, here’s the thought experiment. Imagine yourself in a large ballroom all by yourself in a corner, sitting on a chair, wearing a mask, and smoking a cigarette. I know, it would be terribly hard to smoke a cigarette without disrupting the mask-wearing, but that’s where your brain comes in – imagine that you could smoke a cigarette without constantly taking the mask on and off.

Do you think you would see smoke coming out either through or around the mask? Remember your observations about how masks are generally worn.

Now, imagine there’s another person in this large ballroom in the opposite corner from you. How long do you think it would be before that person smelled smoke? In other words, how long would it take for your smoke particles to get up that other person’s nostrils from many yards away?

Now realize that a coronavirus is smaller than a smoke particle on average.

Does thinking that through change your opinion on the efficacy of masks?

Next time we’ll ask… For whatever help masks provide, what is the price? How, if in any way, does wearing a mask do harm?

Naturally, the leftists are attempting to use the recent heatwave in the Pacific Northwest as an indication that we must put in place all the Green New Deal stuff before the planet is burned down. Fortunately, there’s a meteorologist in town, Chuck Wiese, who can show otherwise. Here’s his recent article:

With the continued and terrible politicization of atmospheric science and climate, I thought I would take a look at the true cause of this historic Pacific Northwest heat wave we just experienced that is now being terminated west of the cascades by a strong push of marine air from off the ocean.

For starters, the synoptic weather pattern that set itself up over our region was handled quite well by the short-term numerical weather forecast models. Before the onset, we saw nearly identical pressure patterns forecast to generate as we typically see with our severest high temperatures. In the climate records, those for Portland were found to occur on July 30, 1965, and both August 8th and August 10th of 1981 at 107 degrees Fahrenheit (degF). These records occurred at the Portland National Weather Service Office located then at the Marine Drive location at the Portland International Airport. The complete records in Portland go back to 1940 for the airport location and downtown Portland back to 1890, but these records at the airport exceeded or equaled any of the records in the downtown location. So they were considered all-time records back to 1890.

At the peak of this heat wave in Portland which was on June 28, the maximum temperature reached 116 degF, a new all-time high temperature record going back to 1890. Several other all-time records were established as well in Oregon and Washington. This is astonishing if you are caught off guard into believing the old records could not be broken by an obscure factor most meteorologists don’t think about on a day-to-day basis. It’s summer, and so pressure patterns that generate the heat were thought of as a comparative to old records with identical synoptic set-ups. This is at least how I looked at things initially along with others who saw the “suspiciously high temperature forecasts” given by the numerical model prediction output that actually forecasted the extreme temperatures accurately. These only became believable as the model output became repetitious in several runs as we got within 2 days of the expected extreme temperatures. This is common practice in operational meteorology to become suspicious of model output extremes especially since we have seen many occasions where extremes in temperature or precipitation given by models back off from those predictions and self-correct within a couple of days of an extreme event. But it turns out the numerical model output in this situation was correct several days in advance.

Why was this? What caused the extremes? Was it really “climate change” related to atmospheric CO2 as some are claiming, or was it something else? When I looked into the specifics, it turns out that “climate change” or atmospheric CO2 had nothing to do with this heat wave.

First off, I looked at the “greenhouse gases”. The water vapor optical depths of the 1981 heat wave and today’s extremes were nearly identical as taken off the atmospheric soundings from Salem, OR. Therefore, that wasn’t the reason. What about atmospheric CO2? In 1981, the Mauna Loa CO2 level was given as 341 ppmv (parts per million volume) whereas today it is 416 ppmv. In calculating the change in radiative forcing from CO2 as a stand-alone constituent, the difference from 1981 to now is only 1.07 Wm-2. (Watts per square meter). Next, I took the mean temperature of the daily temperature delta or deviation, which was about 90 degF, and plugged that into the derivative of the Stefan Boltzmann equation, dF/dT which gives 6.45 Wm-2K-1 or 6.45 Watts per square meter per degree Kelvin. Using this relationship, if CO2 acts alone as permitted in this special case, we get .963 Wm-2 with a ground emissivity of .9 divided by the rate of change of flux with respect to temperature or the 6.45 Wm-2K-1 number which gives .15 degrees Centigrade (degC) or a possible contribution of +.27 degF to the heating total. Therefore, CO2’s contribution to this heat wave is far too small to even move the thermometer upwards from the 107 degF old records to a measurable whole degree F. And this is not even measurable with many of the degree of accuracy specifications on many thermometers.

But if you examine the solar radiation dynamics, you get an entirely different picture that explains how we achieved the new records, and these numbers were obviously incorporated into the numerical weather model outputs several days in advance. It is important to recognize that when we compare the old records to the new, the atmospheric dynamics in 1965, 1981 and today were nearly identical, meaning the subsiding air that sets the convective temperature cap or potential temperature of the surface started the same. This dynamic is what the TV guys were calling the “upper air heat dome” to simplify the concept to the lay person. But the timing of these heat waves was different. In 1981, they occurred in the first week of August and at the end of July in 1965. Today, we are at the end of June or just past the summer solstice or highest sun angle of the year. It turns out this difference of dates is a big deal and actually explains the severity of this heat wave and new maximum temperature all-time records when combined with the upper air dynamics.

The solar radiation reaching the earth’s surface can be calculated anywhere from the relation:

sin(beta) = cos(L) cos(delta) cos (H) + sin(L) sin (delta),

where beta is the solar angle above azimuth or the horizon being solved for, L is earth latitude, delta is the declination angle of the earth to the solar ecliptic plane, and H is the hour angle, taken as 15 degrees per hour from solar noon. By hours or minutes, the sum or integral of the solar radiation can be calculated with the initial condition that the un-depleted radiation approaching the surface is roughly 70% of the solar constant at the normal plane 90 degrees perpendicular to the earth’s atmosphere, where the sun is directly overhead an observer on the ground. The average of the solar “constant” is 1,366 Wm-2, but varies through the year by +/-3% due to the elliptical orbit of the earth around the sun, and reaching the highest value at the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. This change can be calculated directly from the inverse square law of radiation intensity vs. distance.

Using 46 degrees of latitude for Portland, the daily transmitted solar radiation to the surface on June 27th is 2.4894800 x 10^7 Jm-2 (Joules per square meter). Over a 15-hour solar day, the average solar radiation transmitted to the surface is 461 Wm-2. On August 8th, the total surface radiation is 2.0920000 x 10^7 Jm-2 and likewise, over a 14-hour solar day gives an average surface solar insolation of 415 Wm-2. The difference between these two numbers is substantial at a whopping 46 Wm-2! But this difference is mitigated some due to the elliptical orbit of the earth around the sun which between June 27th and August 8th adds an additional 8 Wm-2 of solar insolation to TOA or 6 Wm-2 to the surface at the perpendicular angle to the atmosphere. With the noon solar angle of the sun calculated at 60.49 degrees above azimuth on August 8th, that reduces those values further at Portland’s latitude to 5.2 Wm-2, with the final difference in solar radiation being 40.8 Wm-2 further reduced to 36.72 Wm-2 with a surface emissivity of .9. This is still quite substantial.

If we divide this difference into the rate of change of flux with respect to temperature of 6.45 Wm-2K-1 given above, we get a surplus temperature of 5.69 degC or 10.2 degF compared to the earlier heat waves of record on July 30, 1965 and on August 8th and 10th of 1981. Add this to these old records of 107 degF, and you get 117.2 degF. That comes within 1.2 degF of what the new all-time high temperature record is that was just set for Portland at 116 degF on June 28. Around the area, it’s obvious there could never be a perfect prediction using this alone, as the surface canopy around the Portland metropolitan area and surrounding cities has numerous variations that shade part of the canopy at all times while some surfaces have lower and higher specific heats than what is next to them creating small variations of microclimates that are mixed by wind currents to give a final deterministic temperature. But the point in all of this is clear. Solar radiation was the clear driver in causing these new all-time temperature records and little else.

Now a word about “heat domes”. We must remember these systems are NOT created by greenhouse gases! They are connected by the dynamic westerly wind belt surrounding the earth that has the jet stream winds contained within it. This means the creation of a “heat dome” is directly proportional to the strength of the low-pressure systems upstream or downstream or both and those are also referenced as the “cold” areas of low pressure aloft. Further, it is the low-pressure system generation that causes the strength of the high-pressure system, and its residing subsidence that creates the “heat dome” within the high pressure. Therefore, a stronger heat dome means a stronger low pressure and a stronger low-pressure system is fed by COLD air from high latitudes being accelerated southward by the decreasing Coriolis force associated with northerly winds. This comes about from the theory of planetary Rossby wave physics and the subsequent tie to the Sutcliffe development equation that describes the vertical accelerations of wind that advects atmospheric mass upward and downwind from the low-pressure centers to create the high-pressure systems and “heat domes”.

Thus, it should be clear from all of this that, if atmospheric CO2 was truly causing the climate to change, then the temperature extremes just experienced would not be possible because the gradient of temperature across the latitude lines would lessen, thus reducing the potential energy otherwise available to generate low- and high-pressure systems. The physics of this demands that the storms and high-pressure systems weaken, thus reducing the subsidence or strength of the “heat dome,” thus setting the potential temperature of the surface LOWER, not higher. The incorrect climate propaganda tries to assert the latter, and further, the mean position of the jet stream MUST migrate to higher latitudes causing the distribution of atmospheric mass and pressure to become more uniform across the earth decreasing wind speed on average world-wide.

This means extreme weather of every kind inclusive of temperatures would be lessened, but the mean earth temperature would be increased. World-wide drought would also become a symptom of this, not regional drought that we now experience and that is part of ocean cycles that drive the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO.) This does not fit anything we are seeing happening today. These strong high-pressure systems are an indication of a robust supply of cold air at higher latitude given the season which we see on the daily weather maps, and it is noteworthy again that global air temperatures are at only +.08 degC over the 30-year mean. The global air temperatures have cooled sharply since the beginning of this year due to the La Niña conditions of the tropical Pacific.

It is also worth noting that these pressure patterns are created through chaotic and random variation within the atmospheric system and are not predictable in general terms more than about a week ahead of time with any reliability. It is unlikely we will see any repeat pattern of this within the next week to 10 days and no assurance that this warm and hot weather pattern will even persist for the latter part of the summer. Sometimes the summers can end cooler and wetter and other times hot and dry like now. There is simply no predictability to this except in very general terms as related to the ocean cycles, and they are not even correct at all times. But from this data, a later summer heat wave will never reach the records we just set.

In spite of the truth of all of this, the climate hysteria and propaganda to meet strictly political causes continues. On June 28, Phil Mote appeared live on Mark Mason’s noon show on KEX radio (1190 AM) and told Mason’s audience that he had been warning us all about these extreme heat events and how they would transpire 10 years ago due to rising greenhouse gas concentrations. That’s stunning, Phil. Apparently you could inform the meteorological community in this state how it is possible to predict a naturally occurring historic heat wave 10 years in advance. I don’t know of any scientific method that would enable anyone to do this with. That is self-serving propaganda with no scientific data to back it up with at its very best.

Then Fox 12 (KPTV) quoted Washington State Governor Jay Inslee in stating that it is clear to him we are in a climate emergency from such rapidly changing conditions, and immediate action is needed on the climate, all of which this historic heatwave proves to be false. It is also noteworthy that Governor Jay Inslee is as scientifically ignorant as Senator Michael Dembrow (D) is in Oregon, who is leading the pack in the Oregon legislature to ruin Oregon’s electric grid in the name of “savin’ the planet.” Combining ignorance with political power is a very dangerous experiment with citizen’s lives and livelihoods.

Then there was Kristi Ebi, an epidemiologist from the University of Washington who has no credentials in atmospheric science but inserted herself as an expert as such and was quoted in this story by the AP: Temperature Records Fall as Heat Wave Builds in Northwest US | Voice of America – English (voanews.com) And I quote her: “The scorching weather was caused by an extended “heat dome” over the Pacific Northwest. Kristie Ebi, a professor at the University of Washington who studies global warming and its effects on public health, says the dayslong heat wave was a taste of the future as climate change reshapes global weather patterns.” This is complete nonsense as well and backed up with nothing except from failed climate model predictions that are already projecting the global air temperatures to be 3 times warmer than they actually are.

Meteorologist Matt Zaffino from KGW-TV has also featured several guests as a moderator on their “Straight Talk” program hosted by KGW-TV anchor Laurel Porter on October 24, 2019. The most notable were professors Paul Loikith, Andrew Fountain and Kelly Gleason, all from Portland State University. Ms. Gleason told us on this program that we will lose our Northwest snowpack unless we act to curb “climate change.” Andrew Fountain told us that human CO2 emissions will cause the Northwest glaciers to vanish by the year 2070, and if he is wrong by this time, certainly by 2090. All three professors failed to prove or offer any proof that increasing atmospheric CO2 is the culprit for their suppositions, and further, the winter snowpack continues to show incredible resilience in stability with no discernable trend in the areas like Roaring River, where there is 100 years of record as well as measurements of snowpack from Timberline Lodge. You can always cherry-pick variations to assert there is a discernible trend in the data by picking a start date with a downward variation, but that is dishonest and not representative of a true scientific analysis. The link to this program of climate hysteria is here.

I have several questions for those like ringleader Democrat Senator Michael Dembrow who are promoting this climate hysteria in light of the fact that serious actions are being undertaken by the radical Oregon legislature to ruin Oregon’s electric grid by replacing coal and natural gas sources with hydro and renewable energy. If Oregon’s energy grid is converted to just renewables of solar and wind plus hydro, the load on the electric grid will not meet demand from the increasing number of charging electric vehicles and growing population, particularly from peak load spikes that occur during hot and cold weather. [This was previously detailed here.] Oregon will be facing energy rationing, rolling blackouts and automobile driving rationing, similar but worse than what we are now seeing in California. Here are my questions:

What is the payback to every Oregon and Northwest citizen for sacrificing this standard of living we now enjoy for this horrible mess being created? This means what will any of this accomplish with respect to our climate?
Can anyone among the group that includes Phil Mote, Paul Loikith, Andrew Fountain, Kelly Gleason, Kristi Ebi, and anyone else promoting this climate hysteria assure us that these actions being taken in Oregon or on any other electric grid in the USA will stop sea level rise?
What about extreme temperatures we just experienced? How many declining days of 90-degree or higher temperatures can we expect for this sacrifice?
What about precipitation? How much will any droughts decrease and what will the yearly precipitation levels increase to?
What about flooding? How much will this be reduced in future events and what could we expect the cresting levels to decline to?
What about severe windstorms? Can you assure us that future storms like Columbus Day will be stopped?
Be specific and show your work to “prove” your arguments.

Chuck Wiese, Meteorologist

Steven E. Koonin

Subtitled: What climate science tells us, what it doesn’t, and why it matters.

Excellent review of the status of “the science” on climate change. Should help calm minds prevail. Hardly an equation in it, but lots of graphs. He focuses on where public perception is very different from what science says, and why that’s happening. Here are a few provocative statements…

“Hurricanes show no sign of human influence.”

“Global warming won’t have much impact on the economy at least through the end of this century.”

“There’s no question the globe is warming. The real question is, what do humans have to do with that, and can it, or even should it, be mitigated.”

“Heatwaves in the US are now no more common than they were in 1900.”

“The warmest temperatures in the US have not risen in the past fifty years.”

“Greenland’s ice sheet isn’t shrinking any more rapidly today than it was eighty years ago.”

Stephen C. Meyer

Subtitle: Three scientific discoveries that reveal the mind behind the universe.

And just what are those three discoveries? The Big Bang. The Fine-Tuning of the Universe. The Coding in DNA.

Years ago, my Dad (Presbyterian minister) developed a course for church groups on science and religion, and I picked up on it and offered something similar (see here). I called my course “Is God Expanding, Too?” as it was clear that our scientific understanding was expanding rapidly but our understanding of God was not, perhaps even going backward. This book argues why our understanding and appreciation of both science and God should be at an all-time high.

That’s all that will make the difference says Ed Morrissey in his new book, “Going Red”. Red as in Republican, not red as in communist.

The book argues that 2,000,000 voters in just 7 counties across the country will determine whether we get turned around or continue the course we’re on in this country.

Good luck.

As in “F You!”, courtesy of the State of California. I realize most people don’t believe that California is headed in the wrong direction, disastrously, but it’s true nonetheless. Just do the math. Here’s a good article on the devastating effects the recent minimum wage hike will have on California farming communities (on the heels of other stupid environmental and economic legislated pressures). And the overtime pay increase. Ready for the Neo Dustbowl?

Excerpts:

“You would think that such a valuable economic resource [farming] would be cherished, promoted and helped at every turn. After all, we are talking about producers of food – the most basic societal necessity along with water. Incredibly, that is not the case in California. Instead, the California farmer bears the brunt of many a legislative or regulatory bulldozer.”

“Keep in mind that the law [minimum wage hike] applies uniformly to the entire state. That is the very definition of irrational economics. Here is why: The law applies equally to San Francisco and Mendota.”

“The more something costs, the less of it is acquired. That basic law of economics applies to cars and jobs alike, and rakes its havoc on jobs and the minimally experienced after political laws are passed.”

“Why would the government union do that? That’s easy – according to the state’s Legislative Analyst Office, the minimum wage boost will result in $3.6 billion a year in increased wages for the public employee union workers – none of whom will lose their jobs because they are immune from market forces.” The government leviathan grows…

The article.

The RATE is the percentage at which each of us is taxed. For example, 15% of your income is what you might pay in taxes (depending on your bracket). The REVENUE is the total amount of dollars collected by the government from all the tax payers.

It’s a cold, hard fact. When you raise government tax RATES, tax REVENUE goes down. Conversely, when you lower government tax RATES, the REVENUE goes up. Higher tax RATES impede the economy. Lower tax RATES energize the economy. And when the economy is doing well, more people are paying more taxes and it adds up to more REVENUE to the government.

So, if you want the government to be able to hand out more free stuff, you should go with the candidates who propose lowering tax RATES.

Did you know that Bernie is proposing to raise EVERYONE’s tax rate? We will definitely feel the bern.

Remember the Vietnam War? Remember the Korean War? Remember on TV e-v-e-r-y night the endless stream of casualty counts? Here are some current casualty counts you may well not be aware of…

Jihad Report: Last 30 Days

136 Attacks
1122 Killed
3173 Injured
32 Suicide Blasts
25 Countries

Brussels was just too significant to ignore. The left and the media have us on a collision course with a destiny we will share with the rest of the world if we don’t wake up soon.

Kasich: ““When you die and get to the meeting with St. Peter, he’s probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small, but he is going to ask you what you did for the poor. You better have a good answer.”

I have a good answer. Keeping government small and out of the way helps the economy. And it’s a robust economy that gets the most number of people possible out of poverty. And, by the way, otherwise free as well.

Historically, governments keep people down, in every sense.

So, will you stop with the bleeding heart crap? Do the math. That’s where the answers are.

“Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man.”

Walter E. Williams