by Karl Denninger, Market Ticker:

Climate change is going to ruin us imminently!  We have 20 years, no, 12 years, no ten years to get every single car off the road, every carbon source out, etc — or we’re all going to DIE!

That is the screamfest from every Democrat running in 2020.

The amusing part of it is that the stridency hasn’t increased because of the increasing danger or anything of the sort.

It’s increased because we’re just a few short years away from impossible-to-refute proof that the screaming and scamming were both predicated on a lie and are dead-flat wrong!

Back around the turn of the century it was recognized that there were serious problems with the quality of recorded weather data — specifically, temperature and humidity.  The issue stems from the changing land use around us in the United States and the obvious desire to put a weather station somewhere and leave it there so there’s a continuous record.

A few decades ago the government may well have paid Old McDonald for an easement to stick up a weather station behind a small 10×10′ fence.  He thought — sure, why not?  The original location was very high-quality — no heat sources anywhere near it.

But then Old McDonald dies.  And McDonald’s children don’t want to farm.  So they sell the farm to a developer, who puts up a planned unit development full of houses and businesses.  The easement runs with the land so the station is still there, but now it’s sitting behind a restaurant that is spewing hot air out of the kitchen exhaust fan for 12 hours of the day.

Or it’s near (or in!) a parking lot — blacktop.

Or it’s behind some industrial shop and the air conditioner’s condenser is a few feet away, spewing hot air out of it all summer long.

So the fine weather folks figured out that their data sucked, and set out to do something about it.  They commissioned a cadre of new stations, these all being sited in places they believed would be protected against that.  Most of them in places like national and state parks or land subject to conservation easements — where there would be no Old McDonald who would up and die — and screw up their data in the future.

When looking at these stations there has been no warming at all over the last 20 or so years.  None.  Zippo.

Oops.

There’s another problem: There’s a solar minimum that is very likely coming right here, right now.  Exactly how minimum it will be is impossible to determine in advance, but since 2014 we’ve been in a declining sunspot period in the cycle.  There are several overlapping cycles of sunspots, and there is very good reason to believe we’re in for many fewer of them than usual on a cycle basis.  The more sunspots (that is, the darker the radiating surface) the more heat is radiated; thus, lower sunspot counts correlate with less energy emitted.  Then there’s the ecliptic and elliptical orbital cycles of the planet — which are quite-well known — and predictable too.

All of this strongly suggests that we’re headed into a serious cooling trend that could last for a couple of decades — or more.  This is very likely to be apparent within the next few years; the orbital variations absolutely will happen and if the expected sunspot minimums also occur the cooling is going to be apparent to everyone — and undeniable — within the next five or so years.

That of course will blow up all the greenie-weenie nonsense so the urgency is to act right now before they can’t con people anymore.

Then there’s another fact — the United States’ CO2 emissions have fallen like a stone, and currently are at levels last seen in the 1980s!  This, despite the nation gaining quite a lot in population terms.  Why?

Natural gas fracking, to be specific.

Natural gas has gotten so cheap that it has displaced other fuels — specifically, coal.  Natural gas produces a lot less CO2 than does coal for equivalent energy output — about half as much!  The reason for this is that coal is basically all carbon where natural gas is basically all Methane – CH4.  In other words natural gas has more energy in it for each unit of CO2 produced.

Effectively all of the gains in emissions are coming from China, India and developing nations.  They’re consuming coal and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.  Even if we cut our emissions to zero — an impossible goal — they will outstrip us and continue to add on a net basis.  It’s inevitable, which is why the “climate debate” actually went so far as to claim that population control and encouragement of abortions was part of the Democrat agenda!

But back to the matter of energy and the crazy claims (or just beliefs) of people who apparently either flunked or never took chemistry and physics (even in High School, say much less at any collegiate level.)

The energy state of a chemical reaction is often ignored by various crooners and screamers, but doing so is radically dishonest.  You learn in your first “real” chemistry class that all chemical reactions have an energy term.  A reaction that is exothermic produces energy and one that is endothermic requires energy.  An exothemic reaction has a negative energy term (the product has a lower energy state than the reactants) while an endothermic one has a positive term (that is, the energy state of the product is higher than that of the reactants.)  All chemical reaction equations that do not include the energy term are incomplete.

For example 2H2 + O2 -> 2H2O but that’s an incomplete equation since the reaction releases energy.  483.6kJ/mol of O2 to be exact.  If you have H2O (water) and wish to break it apart into hydrogen and oxygen you must put in that same 483.6kJ/mol.

ALL chemical reactions are subject to this law.  A chemical reaction that is exothermic (releases energy) can be driven the other way by putting the energy back in that was released.  Likewise, one that is endothermic (requires energy) can be reversed and will release that energy.

The laws of thermodynamics can seem complex but when boiled down you can state them as three facts in simple terms:

1. There is no such thing as a free lunch (every use of energy, for any purpose, never results in a net energy gain.)

2. There is no such thing as breaking even (every use of energy, for any purpose, always results in some loss between your starting state’s energy and your finishing state’s energy; that loss is to the environment at-large and cannot be avoided.)

3. There is no such thing as refusing to play either.  That is, all things tend toward lower energy states left on their own without some form of intervention — which requires expending energy.

If you think you’ve managed to evade any of these three you’re wrong.  If you try to sell to someone a claim that you can evade these three rules you’re a fraudster and ought to be in prison.  You cannot evade these laws; they’re not suggestions and they weren’t laws made by men and thus subject to being repealed or ignored either; they’re facts of the physical universe.

Even nuclear reactions honor this.  E = MC^2 tell us that you can transform matter and energy; very, very small amounts of matter turn into huge amounts of energy (because “C”, the speed of light, is such a large number) but the same laws above apply.

There’s another aspect to this which is that all chemical (and nuclear) reactions have what is called an activation energy.  In most cases this activation energy is positive (that is, the reaction must be initiated by adding energy to the system; it will not spontaneously begin on its own.)  In order to “coerce” the reaction to begin in most cases you must put energy into the system in excess of whatever is released or required.  The activation energy is not part of the released (or required) energy from the reaction itself.  A catalyst lowers this activation energy requirement but does not change the energy balance of the reactants and products.  It can’t — if it did you’d have the means to produce energy (in other words, create it out of thin air, otherwise thought of as perpetual motion) and the laws of thermodynamics prohibit that.  Consider the common reaction of burning a piece of coal.  You must ignite the coal in the presence of oxygen; that is, you must put in energy to raise the temperature enough that the coal begins to burn.  That activation energy is not part of the reaction itself.

There are all sorts of people running around Twatter and elsewhere lauding the latest gee whiz thing when it comes to climate, “alternative fuels” and similar.  The latest is a “means” of so-called carbon capture with its alleged innovation being a fairly novel approach to catalysts that results in light hydrocarbon liquids — which could be used as a fuel.  I commented on a twatter thread that Scott Adams thought was “great” and got back a tweet from someone who claimed to be an “expert” asking me to DM him (he didn’t want to have the discussion in public, it appeared.)  I was on the road at the time, headed for the Smokies to run in the Townsend Half Saturday, so I declined to reply, never mind that in order for people who haven’t taken chemistry or physics to understand it you probably needed more than 260 characters — thus this article.

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