Brent Davis

Family first followed by motorcycles, narrowboats, technology and most sports. The older I get, the faster I was.

[Brent Davis @ukbkd]

@bagshaw2112 Tingha and tucker and Auntie Jean Morton. I met them when they opened a shop near my primary school in around 1964. My favourite was Willy Wombat who loved his tummy tickled.

[Brent Davis @ukbkd]

@sewateruk I saw the water cannon going on the site during peak hours between 8.30 and 9am this morning. It might have started earlier but it has stopped now.

[Brent Davis @ukbkd]

@sewateruk Is this an effective use of water while we have a hosepipe ban? A building site in Four Marks, Hampshire. Apparently no one has told the site manager there is a hosepipe ban.

[Brent Davis @ukbkd]

@Feargal_Sharkey @charlie_lawson1 This was happening on a building site on Wednesday.

[Brent Davis @ukbkd]

@sewateruk I observed it around 4pm yesterday but was told by the site manager they are using water cannons all day. I will look tomorrow but even if they do have an exemption, they need to use water responsibly and what they were doing yesterday is definitely not responsible use.

[Brent Davis @ukbkd]

@sewateruk The building site is to the rear of numbers 34 to 44 Lymington Bottom, GU34 5AH. The site manager said he was using a water cannon for most of the working day to suppress dust. I presume you have seen the video I posted.

[Brent Davis @ukbkd]

@sewateruk I have tried to use the link you posted but it requires me to enter an address and the building site doesn’t have one yet. They have water cannons going for most of the day so not outside peak hours. It is such a waste of water as it is not stopping the dust.

[Brent Davis @ukbkd]

@PatrickChristys Harsh but fair 👍

[Brent Davis @ukbkd]

@SimonHarrisMBD If Southgate had been in charge versus Mexico, he would have parked the bus when England went 1 nil up & England would almost certainly have lost. Southgate’s’ most significant achievement as a coach is taking a moderately good Boro side from the Premiership to the Championship.

[Chris Martz @ChrisMartzWX]

What is my stance on climate change?

Well, I'll lay it out for all of you newcomers. Grab some popcorn! 🍿

First, I do not deny the fact that the Earth has warmed up by ~1.2°C since 1850. However, nobody knows precisely how much because of data quality issues (e.g., uneven surface station distribution; fragmented records, especially outside of the United States; station siting changes; and urban heat island contamination) that have not been (and likely cannot be) removed from the record.

But, I have no doubt that the Earth is [slightly] warmer than it was 175 years ago or that 𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒 of that warming might be due to carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions.

Second, contrary to what the online army of alarmist foot soldiers have 𝑚𝑖𝑠𝑙𝑒𝑑 people to believe, there are not really any so-called “fingerprints” that distinguish human-caused global warming from warming caused by other forcings / variability.

Numerous scientific papers claim to have found such a “fingerprint,” but the only evidence that they have presented is that the anomaly of interest is 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ anthropogenic warming. But these authors fail to mention that said anomaly would also be consistent with natural warming.

Case in point, a reduction in low- and mid-altitude stratiform cloud cover, for instance, would allow more sunlight into the climate system, which would warm the oceans. A warmer ocean—all else being equal—increases the rate of evaporation, which raises the vapor pressure (humidity) contributing to polar amplification and faster land warming than the ocean (e.g., Compo & Sardeshmukh, 2008).

🔗https://t.co/sQurHsN80P / open-access: https://t.co/WVKvLrSV7k

All warming, natural or man-made, results in:

1⃣ Higher latitudes warming faster than both the mid-latitudes and tropics.

2⃣ Land heating up faster than the oceans.

This is just basic physics; look up heat capacity.

Also, an increase in, say, solar forcing would have the same material effect, though we can admittedly likely rule that out as the cause of modern trends because sunspot activity has been declining in recent decades. But the sun does affect our climate in ways that have not really been thoroughly researched because little, if any funding, is ever allocated for such projects by the funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF).

In any case, the 𝒃𝒆𝒔𝒕 empirical evidence that I have seen to suggest that there is probably [at least some] anthropogenic “fingerprint” on recent temperature increases is stratospheric cooling.

First, you need to understand that in atmospheric physics, heat flux is measured as power—measured in Watts (that is, Joules per second)—standardized per square meter of surface area. This is written as W/m².

Next, the average radiation flux into the atmosphere is on the order of 239 ± 3.3 W/m² of absorbed solar radiation (ASR) averaged over a year (Stephens et al., 2012). This means that in order for the Earth's surface to maintain a constant temperature, the surface must emit 239.7 ± 3.3 W/m² back to outer space.

🔗https://t.co/5z5iMdazRB / open-access: https://t.co/51Ys5w8BWj

Global warming theory maintains the direct radiative forcing from doubling atmospheric CO₂ levels (often noted as RF 2×CO₂) is 3.7 ± 0.4 W/m² (e.g., IPCC TAR, 2007). That means that the net outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) to outer space is reduced by 3.7 W/m², which creates an Earth energy imbalance (EEI), which leads to a slight warming tendency in the troposphere (surface to ~13 km altitude).

🔗https://t.co/0JkXIQRGDH (p. 357)

In the stratosphere (~13-50 km altitude), this causes a cooling tendency because less infrared radiation (IR) flux is moving upward from below. These relationships were first demonstrated in Manabe & Strickler (1964).

🔗https://t.co/JNaXP7nUC9

NASA satellite measurements indicate that cooling in the stratosphere has been observed since the late 1970s, although there has been very little cooling over the last 25 years, all the while the troposphere has continued to warm.

🔗https://t.co/hT0Oxwm2Io

That means that most of the warming observed since 2000 is likely natural OR perhaps partly caused by a reduction in stratospheric sulfate aerosol concentrations, an artifact of particulate aerosol pollution regulations in recent years.

But, yes, I would agree with most scientists that the cooling observed in the stratosphere, at least that from the 1970s to 2000, is most likely a result of CO₂ forcing.

So what?

What happens down here in the lower atmosphere in response to CO₂ forcing is a lot more nuanced.

Why?

Because here in the troposphere, there are feedbacks (largely cloud-related) and precipitation processes that affect the atmospheric radiation budget far more than CO₂. And how exactly clouds respond to warming in the troposphere, if at all, is not very well understood, and by extension, not well-modeled.

What we do know, theoretically speaking, is that the direct warming effect of RF 2×CO₂ is actually very small. Specifically, it is on the order of ~1°C (e.g., Wijngaarden & Happer, 2020).

🔗https://t.co/y5szlGBmjd

However, amplifying (or dampening) feedbacks that kick in as a response to radiative forcing mean that the real-world value—that is, the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS)—will be higher (lower) than the ~1°C figure derived from radiative transfer calculations.

So, three critical pieces information are unknown:

1⃣ Exactly how much warming has been man-made (since, let's say, 1950). We still don't know the answer to this because the coefficients that are used to ascribe anthropogenic versus natural forcings are all estimated from computer modeling, not real physical in-situ measurements.

2⃣ The exact value of ECS.

3⃣ Even if global warming is entirely man-made, is it really a net drawback to civilization? Is it a crisis? Is it a problem in the slightest?

To break it down:

• If ECS is <3°C, the climate is insensitive to GHGs, and impacts are exaggerated.

• If ECS is ≥3°C, the climate is sensitive to GHGs, and warming could be a concern.

The IPCC’s “best estimate” of ECS is 3°C with a range of 2-5°C.

🔗https://t.co/8Ntgszr1dC (pp. 44-45)

In 1994, using NASA's real-world bulk atmospheric temperature data, one of my mentors, Dr. John Christy and his co-worker, Dr. Richard McNider from the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), calculated climate sensitivity by removing the effects of El Niño / La Niña and volcanic stratospheric aerosol injection (e.g., El Chichón, 1982; Mt. Pinatubo, 1991).

Christy and McNider found that the human-induced warming rate is about 0.09°C / decade (lower than observations of actual temperature increase). This, by the way, came with the stipulation that unknown mechanisms of internal variability or external forcing are assumed to be zero. I attended a lecture where he talked about this paper in detail.

🔗https://t.co/S2GEmUftKo

They then validated their 1994 findings in McNider & Christy (2017). Specifically, they found a near-identical anthropogenic warming rate of only 0.096°C / decade and a transient climate response (TCR) of 1.10 ± 0.26°K.

🔗https://t.co/zueJLn8V8w / open-access: https://t.co/eLcqeizbRh

Many other recent studies (e.g., Lewis & Curry, 2018; Scafetta, 2021; Spencer & Christy, 2023; Lewis, 2025) have all estimated ECS to be far lower than the IPCC AR6's “best estimate.”

🔗https://t.co/8G0sF8gy2p

🔗https://t.co/5TgNX7c1JN

🔗https://t.co/BxyO1XIbNP

🔗https://t.co/YNQhNajrrO

The jury on ECS is still out. 🤷‍♂️

What's more, in order to reliably detect anthropogenic influence on the climate system, EEI must be known to the nearest 0.1 W/m² (Von Schuckmann et al., 2016; Gebbie, 2021).

🔗https://t.co/T7SKxidZ4N / open-access: https://t.co/GD45cbhxIT

🔗https://t.co/L6vZKVVpXg

However, the aforementioned Stephens et al. (2012) estimates the EEI to be 0.6 ± 0.4 W/m², which is eight times larger than the anthropogenic detection limits. And the natural top-of-atmosphere (TOA) flux has a 6.6 W/m² margin of error, which is 66 times larger than the detection limits. This range of uncertainty remains in newer estimates, such as Loeb et al. (2021), which estimates EEI to be 1.12 ± 0.48 W/m².

🔗https://t.co/ynRTFd3LWZ

This means that 𝑚𝑜𝑠𝑡 (but not all!) of the observed global warming since 1950 could be natural and scientists would never know for certain (nor would most be humble enough to admit it because the vast majority of academics have high egos). Alternatively, warming could be mostly man-made like alarmists claim, but, even if that is the case, I'll ask again. . .

SO WHAT?

That doesn't mean it is an existential crisis or urgent problem.

The big unknown are CLOUDS. ☁️

Why?

Because (a) cloud albedo has a far greater impact on the atmospheric radiation budget than does CO₂, and (b) how clouds change in response, if at all, to CO₂ is unknown. What's more, cloud cover can (and does) change naturally without mankind's assistance for any number of reasons (e.g., El Niño / La Niña activity; ocean circulation changes; cosmic ray flux; etc.). Even a small decrease in global cloud area fraction (CAF) can more than offset any temperature rise caused by CO₂. Song et al. (2016), for instance, found that,

🗨️ “[𝐴]𝑙𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑔𝑟𝑒𝑒𝑛ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑠𝑒 𝑒𝑓𝑓𝑒𝑐𝑡 𝑐𝑎𝑛 𝑏𝑒 𝑒𝑛ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑑 𝑏𝑦 𝑖𝑛𝑐𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝐺𝐻𝐺𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑤𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑟 𝑣𝑎𝑝𝑜𝑟 𝑖𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑎𝑡𝑚𝑜𝑠𝑝ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒, 𝑖𝑡 𝑐𝑎𝑛 𝑏𝑒 𝑤𝑒𝑎𝑘𝑒𝑛𝑒𝑑 𝑏𝑦 𝑑𝑒𝑐𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑐𝑙𝑜𝑢𝑑𝑠. 𝐼𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑠𝑒 𝑡𝑤𝑜 𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠 𝑜𝑓𝑓𝑠𝑒𝑡 𝑒𝑎𝑐ℎ 𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟, 𝑎 ℎ𝑖𝑎𝑡𝑢𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑔𝑙𝑜𝑏𝑎𝑙 𝑔𝑟𝑒𝑒𝑛ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑠𝑒 𝑒𝑓𝑓𝑒𝑐𝑡 𝑤𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑢𝑙𝑡.”

🔗https://t.co/NHkmfOc08y

I don't deny that global warming is occurring. I never have. I don't even deny an anthropogenic influence on it either. I never have. What I do reject, however, is unchecked alarmism and climate activism, particularly from fellow scientists.

Activism is not science and has no place in science. If you are an activist, you cannot call yourself a scientist because you are not dispassionate and objective. This goes for the vast majority of self-described “climate scientists” who actively use social media and are well-known in the debate. Two notable exceptions on the other side of the spectrum from me, in my opinion, are Drs. Robert Rohde and Paul Williams, both of whom I have always had pleasant interactions with.

I also reject the idea that every weather event needs to be blamed on climate change with a rushed, half-baked attribution study (namely the ones done by the clowns at World Weather Attribution that are often not scientifically rigorous, but get plenty of news media attention by the Associated Press, CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post). Attribution “science” is fraudulent anyway because one of the architects behind it admitted to Politico in 2021 that it was designed with the intention of using it in litigation against oil and gas companies.

🔗https://t.co/ETUBune0A8

Conflict of interest much?

It should also be abundantly clear that climate is just a statistical description of the mean and variability of the climate system, including long-term weather. So, a change in climate is just a change in statistics. That is an outcome, not a force or accelerant that causes an extreme weather event to occur.

For what it's worth, I used to be a climate alarmist well before I got my degree in meteorology.

Now that I know a great deal (but not everything and never will) about atmospheric science, my position has evolved to a cooler heads point of view. Perhaps it is not my judgement that's clouded, but rather that of the alarmist arm-wavers who have high trust in both academic institutions and their government officials who spoon-feed them pre-canned talking points on the daily.

[M. A. @eurostrategist]

In September 1990, my village in Valencia hit 46°C.

It was the exact kind of natural climate volatility this ancient planet has unleashed for billions of years.

Today, Valencia, Rome, and Athens are actually sitting well below their seasonal averages. Yet, the media is in a coordinated meltdown over a standard two-week warm patch in the UK, France, and Belgium.

As a geospatial engineer who wrote a thesis on climatology, I’m positioned better than many to talk about the topic, the entire narrative relies on a broken view of data systems.

The formula is simple: zoom in on a tiny slice of geography, filter out the cool regions that ruin the story, and label a hot afternoon a global catastrophe.

The funniest part is the sheer hubris of the solution.

We are told the Earth's massive climate system operates like a living room thermostat, that if humans just stop CO2 emissions, we can magically freeze the weather at our preferred temperature.

Pretending we can micromanage global macro-cycles with carbon taxes.

But as long as panic funds the machine, and people don’t think by themselves, they’ll keep selling the front-row tickets.

[Brent Davis @ukbkd]

@PolitlcsUK @FT She could head up the complaints department

[Brent Davis @ukbkd]

@LizKershawDJ @DavidLammy And his father was a crap toolmaker

[Chris Newton @drchrisnewton]

I don't normally like to get personal with politicians, but with Keir Starmer, I'd gladly make an exception. He has behaved appallingly, and deserves no sympathy. He brought it all on himself. He's an arrogant, sanctimonious hypocrite who's now getting what he deserves.

Starmer:

[Brent Davis @ukbkd]

I get that Starmer feels betrayed, but a bit of self awareness wouldn’t go amiss. He was an awful Director of Public Prosecutions, an even worse Prime Minister and his father was a crap toolmaker.

[Brent Davis @ukbkd]

@jonsopel

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Just to remind these same folk:
You’ve not lifted 1/2m kids out of poverty. You’ve just moved them over a bureaucratic line on a Whitehall spreadsheet.
Your ‘workers rights’ are destroying entry-level jobs, hitting young people disproportionately, where unemployment is now over 16%.
You have not transformed the NHS. It’s still the same old wheezing leviathan, just with a lot more dosh and still dismal productivity.
And you’ve nationalised steel and rail before. It was not the prelude to an economic or industrial miracle. Plus you will now have to include their demands for capital/subsidies among all the other priorities already crowding in on the public purse.
Other than that your reminder was useful. Thank you.

[David Shaw @David90shaw]

🚨 A "BIG MOMENT FOR OUR COUNTRY."

Good morning to the millions of everyday Brits waking up to a new digital prison.

Keir Starmer has just officially announced his blanket ban on social media for teenagers!

He literally stood at a podium, rambled on about his childhood in the 1970s, and claimed he is doing this to keep your kids safe. 🤡

You honestly have to laugh at the sheer delusion.

He completely refuses to protect our actual streets from violent criminals, but he is completely obsessed with policing your family's phones.

Do not be fooled for a single second!

To enforce this ban, every single adult in Britain will now be forced to upload a passport or digital ID just to browse the web!

This is not about child safety. It is a massive Trojan horse for total state surveillance.

RT if you see right through this scam and refuse to let the Labour elite control us! 🇬🇧🔥

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Agenda 2030 Or The Defence Of The Realm. Starmer Has Made His Choice. John Healey Has Resigned Over It.

This morning Britain woke up without a Defence Secretary. By lunchtime it knew why.

The numbers tell the story precisely. The Ministry of Defence faces a £28 billion funding shortfall over four years. Healey wanted £18 billion. He was offered £13.5 billion of which defence chiefs regarded only £10 billion as real money. The remaining £3.5 billion was, in the words of the Telegraph, invented through magical accounting tricks. The Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Richard Knighton, took the unusual step of writing directly to Starmer to warn that the money was not enough. The head of the British armed forces writing directly to the Prime Minister is not a routine communication. It is a signal of desperation.

Starmer told NATO last week that it is our intelligence assessment that there could be an attack by Russia on NATO as soon as 2030. Those are his words. His government's assessment. Shared with our allies. Four years away. And his Treasury offered the man responsible for defending against that threat an accounting trick and a two page summary instead of a funded plan. Why. Because the money was needed elsewhere.

In 2015 every United Nations member state including Britain signed the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Its 17 goals and 169 targets commit signatory nations to facilitating migration, eliminating inequality, achieving net zero and embedding inclusive institutions. No British parliament voted on it. No British public was consulted. It was adopted at a UN summit and has been implemented ever since through regulatory frameworks, public sector guidance and institutional capture rather than democratic mandate. It is not a conspiracy. It is a publicly available document on the UN website. And its priorities, net zero, welfare, migration, DEI, are precisely the budgets this government has protected while offering the defence of the realm an accounting trick.

Ed Miliband refused to cut his net zero budget to fund defence. The Labour Party refused to cut welfare spending that would have freed up billions. The £10 billion in asylum accommodation contracts continues. The DEI infrastructure embedded across British policing, the NHS, the civil service and the education system continues to be funded. Every one of these is a commitment that takes precedence over the defence of the realm in this government's spending decisions.

The hierarchy of priorities is now visible. A government that has spent two years embedding progressive transformation across British institutions, protecting the net zero agenda from cuts and managing mass migration has discovered that it cannot simultaneously do all of that and defend the country. When the moment of decision arrived the progressive agenda was protected and the armed forces were handed a two page summary and told to make do.

Lord Robertson, the former Labour Defence Secretary and NATO Secretary General, warned in April that Britain was underprepared, underinsured and under attack. He said there was a corrosive complacency in Britain's political leadership. The army has been reduced to its smallest size in 200 years. Seven warships have been axed. The Defence Investment Plan was due last autumn, delayed through winter, missed its spring deadline and has now produced the resignation of the Defence Secretary on the day it was finally meant to be published.

Healey's letter says without a plan that meets the moment he is being forced to make decisions that would reduce the readiness of our forces, increase the risk to personnel on operations and could make the country less safe. He had no other option but to resign.

In the most dangerous security environment since the Cold War a Labour government has chosen the globalist agenda over the defence of the realm. That choice has now cost it its Defence Secretary. The question is what it will cost the country.