From The Daily Caller Nicholas Elias Contributor June 29, 2020 11:58 AM ET Russia said Monday that it did not detect a radiation emergency after sensors discovered last week that strange nuclear particles were present in Sweden. “We have an absolutely advanced radiation levels safety monitoring system and there are no any emergency alarms,” said…
From The Daily Caller Kyle Hooten Contributor August 09, 2019 10:05 AM ET A team of scientists have created a new vodka made with crops and water from inside Chernobyl’s infamous exclusion zone. Chernobyl is an abandoned Russian nuclear power plant that melted down in 1986, creating a 1000 square mile exclusion zone that’s still…
Paper Via Junk Science Edward J. Calabresea,*, Robert J. Golden School of Public Health and Health Sciences, Department of Environmental Health Sciences, Morrill I N344, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, 01003, USA b702 Linslade Street, Gaithersburg, MD, 20878, USA ABSTRACT The linear non-threshold (LNT) dose response model for cancer risk assessment has been a controversial…
From Forbes Michael Shellenberger Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. Energy I write about energy and the environment After a tsunami struck the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan eight years ago today, triggering the meltdowns of three reactors, many believed it would result in a public health catastrophe. “By now close to…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach In my last post I investigated the mathematical relationship between the amount of total precipitable water vapor (TPW) in the atmosphere, and the clear-sky greenhouse effect. Here is the main figure from that post showing the relationship: Figure 1. Scatterplot, TPW (horizontal scale) versus Atmospheric Absorption (vertical scale). Dashed yellow…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach One of my great pleasures is to come across a new dataset. Turn me loose on new observations of this magical world, and there’s no telling where I’ll end up. Thanks to a recent article here on WUWT I got to thinking about water vapor. Some research found the RSS…
Study: 2 major US aquifers contaminated by natural uranium Naturally occurring uranium is being mobilized by farm-related pollution From the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Nearly 2 million people throughout the Great Plains and California above aquifer sites contaminated with natural uranium that is mobilized by human-contributed nitrate, according to a study from the University of…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach I stumbled across a lovely article about the Saharan silver ant over at phys.org. These ants have special hairs that reflect strongly in the visual and radiate strongly in the infrared. They show a photo of the ant hairs under a couple different amounts of magnification: Figure 1. Photograph from the phys.org…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach Despite doing lots of research and investigations over the last few weeks, I’ve written little. Well, actually, I’ve published little, although I’ve written a lot. But I didn’t publish what I’d done, there was no wonder in it, no awe. So I tossed it all out and started “simply messing…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach The CERES dataset is satellite data that is based on radiation measurements made from low earth orbit. The CERES data has two parts. The first part is observational data, measurements of downwelling and upwelling solar radiation and of upwelling longwave radiation. It is usually referred as the CERES “top-of-atmosphere” data.…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach Since the late Nineties the US has had seven industrial-strength stations that measure a variety of climate variables every minute, 24/7. These are called “SURFRAD” stations. As a data junkie I’ve been wanting to look at their results for a while … but the data is in an ugly format. They have…
What Slow Fourier Transforms can tell us. Guest essay by Stan Robertson, Ph.D., P.E. On May 3, 2014, an article on WUWT by Willis Eschenbach entitled, The Slow Fourier Transform (SFT) was posted. As he noted, the amplitude of the Slow Fourier Transform components are in the same units as the fitted data, intervals of…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach I’ve been messing about with the “Modtran” online calculator for atmospheric absorption. It’s called “Modtran” because it is a MODerate resolution program to calculate atmospheric infrared absorption written in ForTRAN, which calculates the result for each 1 cm-1 wide band of the wavenumber across the spectrum. Not quite a “line-by-line” calculation, but…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach There is a more global restatement of Murphy’s Law which says “Nature always sides with the hidden flaw”. Parasitic losses are an example of that law at work. In any heat engine, either natural or manmade, there are what are called “parasitic losses”. These are losses that tend to reduce…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach Well, another productive ramble through the CERES dataset, which never ceases to surprise me. This time my eye was caught by a press release about a new (paywalled) study by Gordon et al. regarding the effect of water vapor on the climate: From 2002 to 2009, an infrared sounder aboard…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach I got to wandering through the three main datasets that make up the overall CERES data, and I noticed an odd thing. The three main datasets are the all-sky downwelling solar, upwelling reflected solar, and upwelling longwave radiation, measured in watts per square metre (W/m2). Here are those three datasets:…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach There’s a much-cited paper (129 citations) from 1994 called “On the Observed Near Cancellation between Longwave and Shortwave Cloud Forcing in Tropical Regions” by J. T. Kiehl (hereinafter Kiehl1994), available here. The paper makes the following claim (emphasis mine): ABSTRACT Observations based on Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) satellite data indicate that…
With much fanfare from the faithful (a grand total of 15 comments as of this writing), SkepticalScience recently released their 4-Hiroshima-Bombs-per-second widget. Their claimed intent is to “raise the awareness of global warming”. Nonsense. Their intent is to scare people—children and adults—into believing that something must be done about global warming. It’s nothing but propaganda—plain…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach To continue my investigations utilizing the CERES satellite dataset of top of atmosphere radiation, here is a set of curious graphs. The first one is the outgoing (upwelling) longwave radiation at the top of the atmosphere (TOA) versus the sea surface temperature, for the northern hemisphere, at the times of…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach Back in August 2010, WUWT ran an article wherein it was claimed that variations in the sun changed the rate of radioactive decay. This, of course, flew in the face of years and years of experimental evidence, starting with the Curies, that the rate of radioactive decay is constant, unaffected…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach. For all of its faults, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) lays out their idea of the climate paradigm pretty clearly. A fundamental part of this paradigm is that the long-term change in global average surface temperature is a linear function of the long-term change in what is called…
From The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists via SAGE Publications comes this press release claiming that because nuclear fallout was tracked by meteorological instrumentation and synoptic scale models, it somehow relates to climate science. I think it’s a stretch. About the only connection I see is that many of the same people who worry greatly…
Via Tom Nelson, no wonder they hate nuclear power so much, they don’t see any difference! Global warming increasing by 400,000 atomic bombs every day | The Vancouver Observer The amazing persistence of CO2 in the air has allowed billions of our small emissions, like those from the Enola Gay, to amass into an ever…
From the “Oh noes it’s Radiation” department, Dr. Leif Svalgaard points out we all got a gamma ray bath on that recent big solar flare. I wonder how many Banana Equivalent Doses we all got?
Guest Post by Reed Coray On Dec. 6, 2011 12:12 am Lord Monckton posted a comment on a thread entitled Monckton on sensitivity training at Durban that appeared on this blog on Dec. 5, 2011. In that comment he wrote: “First, it is not difficult to calculate that the Earth’s characteristic-emission temperature is 255 K.…
From the University of California – San Diego via Eurekalert First quantitative measure of radiation leaked from Fukushima reactor Observations of radioactive sulfur that formed when seawater was used to cool reactors and spent fuel ponds reveal the amount of radiation leaked from damaged fuel Atmospheric chemists at the University of California, San Diego, report…
As WUWT readers know, I’m an advocate of do it yourself, amateur science, that what the surfacestations.org project was. This however, in our hypersensitive world, was a recipe for trouble: Swedish Man Arrested For Building a Nuclear Reactor In His Kitchen Swedish police have detained a 31-year-old man in Ängelholm in western Sweden who was…
Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. writes: News Article On The Earth’s Heat From Radioactive Decay An intriguing news article has appeared by Charles Q. Choi titled Radioactive decay fuels Earth’s inner fires The article includes the text “Extraordinary amount of heat remains from primordial days, scientists say The researchers found the decay of radioactive isotopes uranium-238 and thorium-232…
By WUWT regular “Just The Facts” I am often amused by claims that we understand Earth’s climate system, are able to accurately measure its behavior, eliminate all potential variables except CO2 as the primary driver of Earth’s temperature and make predictions of Earth’s temperature decades into the future, all with a high degree of confidence.…
Guest Post by Ira Glickstein Solar “light” radiation in = Earth “heat” radiation to Space out! That’s old news to those of us who understand all energy is fungible (may be converted to different forms of energy) and energy/mass is conserved (cannot be created nor destroyed). My Visualizing series [Physical Analogy, Atmospheric Windows, Emission Spectra,…
Guest Post by Ira Glickstein This series began with a mechanical analogy for the Atmospheric “Greenhouse Effect” and progressed a bit more deeply into Atmospheric Windows and Emission Spectra. In this posting, we consider the interaction between air molecules, including Nitrogen (N2), Oxygen (O2), Water Vapor (H2O) and Carbon Dioxide (CO2), with Photons of various…
As many know, I’m a big fan of citizen science. There’s much that can be contributed by the layman that the government often cannot or will not do. Since many people seem to be worried about nuclear fallout from Japan’s nuclear reactors, particularly on the west coast, I’m happy to introduce this live map, updated…