Dès 1742, dans la région de Pechelbronn en Alsace, des tarières (outils permettant de percer le sol) étaient destinées à localiser les filons de sable bitumineux. L’huile était séparée du sable par lessivage à l’eau bouillante, puis distillée pour obtenir des produits pharmaceutiques, de l’huile pour lampe, de la graisse et de la poix.
C’est en 1778 que Peter Pond a localisé les premières sources de bitume dans la région d’Athabasca, mais c’est Robert Fitzsimmons, un entrepreneur, qui est le premier à avoir séparé le bitume du sable et qui l’a utilisé pour recouvrir les routes et les toitures. Si les Amérindiens ont depuis des siècles utilisé ce bitume pour calfater des embarcations, les sables bitumineux n’ont vraiment attiré l’attention de l’industrie pétrolière qu’après les chocs pétroliers.
As the reconstruction of the climate’s development in the past by proxy data shows, there’s a series of temperature cycles that appear to be unknown, or ignored by many climate scientists. Among these are the larger climate cycles of 150 million to 180 million years (see Part 1 and Part 2), but also the shorter and for us the more important following cycles:
1000 years (900-1100) Suess cycle with +/- 0.65°C
230 years (230-250) deVries cycle with +/- 0.30°C
65 years (60-65) Ocean cycles with +/- 0.25°C
This regrettably postpones the much-anticipated Hudson Bay System Study (BaySys) involving 40 scientists from five universities across Canada. Timing was key for this $17 million, four-year, University of Manitoba-led project.
The 2017 Edition of the REN21 Renewables Global Status Report reveals a global energy transition well underway, with record new additions of installed renewable energy capacity, rapidly falling costs, and the decoupling of economic growth and energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. This year’s report continues REN21’s long-standing tradition of providing the most up-to-date data and informative infographics to detail renewable energy’s contribution to the energy transition.
Scientists at Michigan State University (MSU) show that examining the daily minutia of climate, not just temperature, but also sunshine, precipitation and soil moisture simultaneously all over a country gives a better understanding of how variable a land’s climate can be. That information is crucial when countries are setting policies aimed at growing food, protecting water supplies and the environment and stemming disease outbreaks. The findings were reported in this week’s Scientific Reports.
The electric car has dropped out of favor in the country that pioneered renewable energy.
Sales in Denmark of Electrically Chargeable Vehicles (ECV), which include plug-in hybrids, plunged 60.5 percent in the first quarter of the year, compared with the first three months of 2016, according to latest data from the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (ACEA). That contrasts with an increase of nearly 80 percent in neighboring Sweden and an average rise of 30 percent in the European Union.
The reduction in global temperature after the recent El Nino continues though not as swiftly as some predicted. The next few months will be interesting to see if it returns to levels seen before the recent El Nino took place when global annual average temperatures changed little for at least 15 years.
The best way to kill off the Climate Debate is to do what Team-Alarm has done for years — stop talking about whether it’s real, and just project forwards, detailing the collapse. For twenty years others have been saying “the debate is over”. Now the tables are turning. The debate really is over, skeptics won, and what’s left is to watch it continue to unravel. Clive James argues that it won’t collapse like a house of cards… (an extract from the new IPA book Climate Change: The Facts 2017.)
In this article, I explore the scientific literature on possible solar indirect effects on climate, and suggest a reasonable way of looking at them. This should also answer Leif Svalgaard’s question, though it seems rather unlikely that he would be unaware of any of the material cited here. Certainly just about everything in this article has already appeared on WUWT; the aim here is to present it in a single article (sorry it’s so long). I provide some links to the works of people like Jasper Kirkby, Nir Shaviv and Nigel Calder. For those who have time, those works are worth reading in their entirety.
The basic physics behind CO2 warming the oceans, and therefore the atmosphere simply don’t exist. The only defined mechanism by which CO2 can affect climate change is by “thermalizing” long-wave infrared radiation between 13 and 18-microns. In reality, there is another one, radiation, but that carries heat away from the earth and results in atmospheric cooling.
In previous posts (here, here and here), we have shown reconstructions for the Antarctic, Southern Hemisphere mid-latitudes, the tropics, the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes, and the Arctic. Here we combine them into a simple global temperature reconstruction. The five regional reconstructions are shown in figure 1. The R code to map the proxy locations, the references and metadata for the proxies, and the global reconstruction spreadsheet can be downloaded here
Plastics in the marine environment have become a major concern because of their persistence at sea, and adverse consequences to marine life and potentially human health. Implementing mitigation strategies requires an understanding and quantification of marine plastic sources, taking spatial and temporal variability into account. Here we present a global model of plastic inputs from rivers into oceans based on waste management, population density and hydrological information.
Rocks alone seem to show that the breakup happened 180 million years ago. But a team of Australian scientists think that you should be able to see the split and continuing shifts written into the history of how animals have evolved. So that’s what the researchers did, and they accomplished this by analyzing a large group of species’ evolution and compared them to the date of the breakup of Pangea.
The conventional basic climate model applies “basic physics” to climate, estimating sensitivity to CO2. However, it has two serious architectural errors. It only allows feedbacks in response to surface warming, so it omits the driver-specific feedbacks
A new NASA study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers.
The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice.
According to the new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008.
As we did in the previous two posts, we will examine each proxy and reject any that have an average time step greater than 130 years or if it does not cover at least part of the Little Ice Age (LIA) and the Holocene Climatic Optimum (HCO). We are looking for coverage from 9000 BP to 500 BP or very close to these values. Only simple statistical techniques that are easy to explain will be used.
by Arthur Viterito, April 25, 2016 in J. of Earth Sc. & Climatic Change
Earth’s climate is a remarkably “noisy” system, driven by scores of oscillators, feedback mechanisms, and radiative forcings. Amidst all this noise, identifying a solitary input to the system (i.e., HGFA MAG4/6 seismic activity as a proxy for geothermal heat flux) that explains 62% of the variation in the earth’s surface temperature is a significant finding. Additionally, the 1997/1998 SIENA was a strong signal for subsequent global warming, and this type of seismic jump may provide valuable predictive information
The increasing absorption of CO2 and associated decline in seawater pH values is thought to pose direct harm to marine life in the decades and centuries to come by affecting rates of survival, calcification, growth, development and/or reproduction. However, as ever more pertinent evidence accumulates, a much more optimistic viewpoint is emerging.
From the UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX and overheated climate science department, comes a claim that just doesn’t seem plausible, suggesting that in the future, nearly 11% of a “worst-off city” gross domestic product would be consumed by UHI boosted climate change. On the other hand, the study is by Dr. Richard Tol, who is well respected by the climate skeptic community. He does have a point about “the effects of uncontrolled urban heat islands”
Overheated cities face climate change costs at least twice as big as the rest of the world because of the ‘urban heat island’ effect, new research shows.
Les États-Unis sont restés les premiers producteurs mondiaux de gaz naturel et d’hydrocarbures liquides en 2016 selon un article publié hier par l’EIA américaine. État des lieux.
La reprise de la hausse de production américaine d’hydrocarbures liquides est, selon IFP Énergies nouvelles, due pour moitié au pétrole de schiste mais aussi à une augmentation de la production des liquides de gaz naturel et de celle de pétrole issu de gisements offshore (fruit des investissements décidés entre 2010 et 2014 lorsque les cours du pétrole étaient au plus haut).
I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet since late last summer, and here are the results, as of June 6th, 2017. (Quick and easy data source, the daily sunspot image archives from Solarham.)
This data (through March; I’ve updated it since then) was posted on Jerry Pournelle’s blog a while back, and it elicited several questions from readers, who didn’t understand the information contained therein. So here is an effort to elaborate on the data, for those of you who aren’t astronomers/ astrophysicists and don’t want to have to keep up with all this stuff.
La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse
