“…Whatever, there is no PROVEN cased for backing away from the use of fossil fuels.”

I second that, in spades. “Green” energy isn’t very green, and is mostly a fiction peddled by rent seekers who want to feed at the public trough.

Recently I was amused to read a story about a village in India that practically rioted over their green, sustainable sources of electricity. Apparently this village never had electricity, and Greenpeace India came in and electrified the place, but the catch was it was going to use solar panels to produce it.

You might think one place solar would work is India, but there’s often a lot of cloud cover. The upshot was this village got all wired up, the villagers were looking forward to the promise of electricity for the first time in their lives, and they’d flick a light switch, and….

Nothing would happen.

Apparently this really upset them, even though they had gone without electricity for eternity. But they had been promised something and they didn’t get it. So they demanded the village be hooked up to the government power grid. They demanded “real” electricity produced by burning good old fossil fuels, not the “fake” electricity Greenpeace gave them.

All in all, unless you’re talking nuclear, “green” energy is something of a nightmare. In places like Britain where they’ve “gone green” by government edict the elderly die in the thousands during the winter because it just isn’t there when they need it, or they can’t afford it. They try to stay warm in their homes by burning books. What “green” sources of energy do best apparently in addition to killing the elderly is kill birds. Incinerating them in the case of the Ivanpah power plant, part of the Mojave Solar Project in California, or chopping them to bits at wind farms. Not that they don’t pose a threat to people of all ages. Pilots flying into LAX complain about the blinding effect of the Mojave mirrors. And then there are the people in England who live near windfarms and fear for their lives because the turbine blades throw off massive chunks of ice during the winter (winters that were supposed to be things of the past according to people I can hardly call scientists at the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit, who good Bolsheviks that they are have scrubbed the interwebs clean of their 2001 prediction that by 2011 children growing up in England wouldn’t know what snow was).

You know, if you or I killed raptors or blinded pilots with lasers we’d be in prison. But the “green” energy industry gets away with it.

Electric cars are not zero emissions vehicles. They are remote emissions vehicles. The energy source producing the electricity they need, again unless you’re talking nuclear, is simply out of sight and therefore to your average environmentalist out of mind.

Meanwhile on the conventional automotive front Road and Track tested an Ultra-Low Emissions Vehicle from Honda a couple of years back in L.A. When they pulled the probe out of the tailpipe and exposed it to the standard L.A. atmosphere it registered higher levels of pollution. What was coming out of the exhaust was cleaner than the air the testers were breathing. And yes I know the Volkswagen thing might plant doubt in a readers’ mind but I’m still not convinced that electric cars pollute less or produce less so-called greenhouse gasses when you do a full accounting of what goes into their production. And the battery pack only lasts ten years. Good luck selling that used electric car.

All in all, not only is there not a good case to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels, there isn’t a case to be made that it’s possible.

If phytoplankton are growing more abundant rather than dying off, that would be one of the variables that the models don’t account for. Which would figure into why they are so bad at making predictions.

Here’s another wildcard; this past September scientists from the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research at the University of Leipzig and from the Institute of Catalysis and Environment at the University of Lyon published a paper announcing a major discovery. The oceans also produce isoprene abiotically. The sunlight acting on the organic material in the few micrometers of the surface film of the ocean (the surface microlayer) also is a source of a large amount of isoprene.

Which means essentially that the oceans produce about twice as much isoprene as scientists previously thought. That’s how settled the science is. They’re still learning basic facts. One of my favorite pastimes is keeping track of how the climate hysterics airbrush the history of their failed predictions with Bolshevik consistency.

If you are into this sort of thing, two sites I can recommend are Watt’s Up With That? by retired meteorologist Anthony Watts and Polar Bear Science by zoologist and (naturally) polar bear specialist Susan Crockford. Watts is sort of the Matt Drudge of climate reporting. He has tons of contributors, and also compiles climate science news from around the globe. Susan Crockford’s little finger knows more about polar bears, and consequently the arctic and conditions that effect polar bears, then Al Gore and the entire editorial staff of the New York Times combined could even imagine. Such as:

http://polarbearscience.com/2015/12/06/paris-climate-change-deal-will-not-stop-polar-bears-dying-due-to-thick-ice-in-spring/#more-69531

“Thick spring ice due to natural causes is currently the single biggest threat to polar bears. Not declining summer sea ice — thick spring ice. That could change in the future but right now, the evidence supports that statement.

…Sea ice models do not address past or future changes in spring ice thickness and predictive models of polar bear survival blame all population declines on summer sea ice declines despite strong evidence to the contrary (Crockford 2015: The Arctic Fallacy). Thick spring ice near shore drives seals to give birth elsewhere because they cannot maintain their breathing holes in the ice (below). This leaves mothers emerging from onshore dens with newborn cubs (above) with nothing to eat at a time when they desperately need food: cubs die quickly, mothers more slowly. Young bears on their own for the first time also die at higher rates than usual…”

Since I didn’t include links on the greening of the earth through added CO2, and since that point is directly applicable to the OP phytoplankton mystery, let me add some here. (There are many suck links one could add.)

MAP of increasingly greener earth by Ranga Myneni, Boston University http://cliveg.bu.edu/images/greening-earth.jpg

FROM 2013, “How Fossil Fuels Have Greened the Planet” by Matt Ridley in the Wall Street Journal
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323374504578217621593679506

Matt Ridley in this illustrated lecture on the above – about the net global greening – also explains how plants grow better with more CO2 (19 minutes), producing more food – and we are using LESS land to feed the world, and net reforestation is happening in half the world, and species extinction declines are REVERSING because of fossil fuels? Yes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-nsU_DaIZE

“Increasing Carbon Dioxide Levels Causing The Desert to Bloom” http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/2871/20130709/increasing-carbon-dioxide-levels-causing-desert-bloom-study.htm

From 2015, “SATELLITE DATA SHOW THE EARTH IS GETTING GREENER” http://www.popsci.com/new-study-shows-earth-getting-greener

From October of this year, Dr Indur Goklany, “Carbon Dioxide, The Good News” – an in depth report
http://www.thegwpf.org/climate-doomsayers-ignore-benefits-of-carbon-dioxide-emissions/

All of this is tremendously good news for the planet and humanity – and the eco-hysterics and global warming alarmists absolutely HATE THIS! (Here’s example of their BELIEFS, contradicted by findings above, see this slide http://image.slidesharecdn.com/19-141225043955-conversion-gate01/95/sasraimovement-presentation-aimed-at-habitable-earth-51-638.jpg%3Fcb%3D1419505196)

Lots of full professorships and lifetime appointments there for the lucky guy or gal.

I’m working on reviving a checkers program I wrote 35 years ago. An 8×8 grid, 24 pieces, and it is really difficult to create a smart program that can solve this closed system. It has been done, but chess is still unsolved. The climate models involve tens of thousands of data points, millions of variables, and little recognition of variables like solar output and cloud cover. Not surprisingly, these climate models have no predictive value. Yet, policy is based on them. Climate science based on these models is dangerous pseudo science.

The quest for the truth must await the passage of more time and better data.

But there is always this:
It’s my solemn duty to tell you about the impending end of the Earth. Yes, it’s January 27, 2016. That’s the date Al Gore predicted all would be lost back on January 27, 2006. Don’t believe me? Read this: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2006/01/27/algore_we_have_ten_years_left_before_earth_cooks
🙂

Watts Up With That just had a fascinating article examining how supercomputer algorithms for simple mathematical functions could diverge over many repetitions. Wouldn’t it be hilarious if all this “global warming” hysteria was simply due to mathematical errors in calculating T^4th?