Climate stupidity is not limited to America

Europe has taken environmental hysteria to a new level

Underneath the Netherlands lies the largest natural gas field in Europe if not in the world. The Groningen field still contains about 450 billion cubic meters of natural gas, enough to fully offset the deepening shortage of fossil fuel energy plaguing Europe and the United Kingdom. Yet environmentalist mentality stands in the way not only fears of climate change but also fears of earthquakes triggered by drilling.

Source: Bloomberg

Unlike San Francisco or Japan, where citizens live with earthquake risks on a daily basis, fear of earthquakes seems to dominate Europeans who prefer freezing in the dark, it seems. The Netherlands is not alone.

United Kingdom is believed to have trillions of cubic feet under its feet, based on estimates of shale natural gas reserves by the British Geological Survey which found between 23 and 67 Tcf of gas as likely present. With one climate nutter after another in the British Parliament and the fossil fuel paranoia of the current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (who gives speeches about the need for action to curb climate change) there is little chance the British will deal with their energy shortage themselves instead of pleading for help from North America and the Middle East. Where did British common sense go to die? Whitehall I guess.

Whilte Rishi Sunak and his tribe of deluded climate nutters dither, United Kingdom citizens are being treated to the highest energy costs in history as reported by Bloomberg, up tenfold since the summer. A cold winter is exposing the lunacy of reliance on “renewables” despite plentiful oil & gas under British feet.

The emergence of ChatGPT, a plain English free artificial intelligence (AI) platform, gives anyone who bothers the opportunity to explore a richer search experience than Google (GOOG) and to ask questions involving the current state of climate knowledge and issues in mathematics, physics and chemistry. I tried the service today and was blown away by its speed and accuracy.

One question I asked was how much energy (in watts per square meter of Earth’s surface) was “trapped” in atmosphere by the so-called “Greenhouse Effect” (it has nothing whatever to do with greenhouses) and got an immediate answer in seconds that the current equilibrium (which supports surface temperatures of about 15 degrees Celsius) reflects approximately 240 watts per square meter of “trapped energy”. Of course the term “trapped” is used metaphorically since all energy arriving on Earth from the Sun eventually makes its way back to space but is slowed in its escape by interactions with CO2 and water vapour (among other so-called “Greenhouse Gases” or GHG’s). That input was useful.

The greenhouse theory posits that without Greenhouse Gases in Earth’s atmosphere, the surface temperature of Earth would be 273 degrees Kelvin or absolute zero, since all of the Sun’s energy arriving on Earth would immediately be reflected back to space but for interactions with GHG’s. 15 degrees Celsius is 288 degrees Kelvin for those who have forgotten grade 11 physics.

Legions of so-called climate scientists publishing papers comprising the feedstock for periodic reports by the Interplanetary Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have claimed that a doubling of CO2 levels in the atmosphere would cause an additional 3.77 watts per square meter of energy to be “trapped” increasing the equilibrium surface temperature by an amount called the “climate sensitivity” of CO2 and the estimates of climate sensitivity have been all over the map.

But some things are so obvious even I can see them clearly. If 240 watts per square meter is sufficient to maintain an equilibrium surface temperature of 15 degrees Celsius (with diurnal, season and regional differences of course) an increase in the trapped energy would have a linear increase in the equilibrium temperature. We know from high school physics that the specific heat capacity of air is 1.2 kilojoules per kilogram and that 1 watt is 1 joule per second. The relationship between joules and temperature for all materials is linear.

Energy required to heat Earth’s atmosphere by 1 degree Kelvin is 1.2 kilojoules x mass of atmosphere in kilograms. This product is a constant except for minor changes in mass as the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere changes from time to time, but for the purposes of this argument assume it is more or less constant. The only other variable in heating the mass of Earth’s atmosphere is energy which climate scientists have estimated in watts per square meter of Earth’s surface. The surface of the Earth in square meters is also a constant. The equation for the temperature of Earth’s atmosphere is a the amount of energy “trapped” multiplied by a constant. As with all materials, the relationship with between joules of energy and temperature is is a linear relationship.

What that compels is that if the energy “trapped” by GHG’s rose to 243.7 watts per square meter, the surface temperature that results would be 243.7/240 x 15 degrees Celsius = 15.23 degrees Celsius.

In an earlier article I published an estimate that doubling CO2 levels adding 3.77 watts per square meter of “trapped” energy would see the global average temperature (whatever that is, since renowned atmospheric physicist says such a metric cannot be reliably calculated) rise by 0.3 degrees Celsius. That is as close as dammit to a rise of 0.23 degrees. My earlier article relied on a rough estimate of the mass of atmosphere while the present calculation needs no such reliance. Given the size and complexity of the atmosphere whose mass changes with the concentration of water vapour present, the difference between 15.23 and 15.3 is immaterial.

No matter how you cut it, increasing CO2 concentrations will not cause any material amount of “global warming” and the Anthropogenic Global Warming theory is nonsense.