Meat, Dairy Industry Surpass Big Oil As World’s Biggest Polluters

by P. Homewood, July 31, 2018 in NotaLotofPeoppleKnowThat


Within the next few decades, Big Meat and Big Dairy could surpass Big Oil as the world’s biggest climate polluters, a new study by non-profit GRAIN and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) showed on Wednesday.

The world’s biggest animal protein producers could soon surpass ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP as the largest contributors to climate pollution, according to the study.

IATP and GRAIN jointly published the study that quantifies emissions from 35 of the world’s largest meat and dairy companies and reviews their plans to fight climate change.

The report found out that the five largest meat and dairy corporations combined – JBS, Tyson, Cargill, Dairy Farmers of America, and Fonterra – are already responsible for more annual greenhouse gas emissions than ExxonMobil, Shell, or BP. According to one figure in the report, the combined emissions of the top five companies are on par with those of Exxon and significantly higher than those of Shell or BP.

Hommage au Professeur Istvan Marko

by G. Gueskens and A. Préat, 31 juillet 2018, in ClimateScienceEnergie


Cela fait un an, le 31 juillet 2017, que le Professeur Istvan Marko nous quittait prématurément à l’âge de 61 ans.

Ce scientifique, chimiste, était un de ceux qui était le plus écouté à l’échelle nationale et internationale, pour ses avis pertinents sur les problèmes climatiques d’aujourd’hui, aussi bien sous l’angle scientifique que celui de leurs emballements médiatiques. Nous lui avons rendu hommage il y a un an à travers un numéro spécial dédié à sa personne, et poursuivons son action dans l’esprit qui fut toujours le sien , celui de la rigueur scientifique.

Climatology’s startling error – an update

by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, July 30, 2018 in WUWT


How climatologists forgot the Sun was shining

Climatologists trying to predict global warming forgot the sunshine in their sums. After correction of this startling error of physics, global warming will not be 2 to 4.5 K per CO2doubling, as climate models imagine. It will be a small, slow, harmless and net-beneficial 1.17 K.

The Completely Fake Time Of Observation Bias

by Tony Heller, July 30, 2018 in ClimateChangeDispatch


In 1999, NASA’s James Hansen was concerned that the very high-quality US temperature record didn’t match Hansen’s fake global warming trend.

How can the absence of clear climate change in the United States be reconciled with continued reports of record global temperature? Part of the “answer” is that U.S. climate has been following a different course than global climate, at least so far. Figure 1 compares the temperature history in the U.S. and the world for the past 120 years.

in the U.S. there has been little temperature change in the past 50 years, the time of rapidly increasing greenhouse gases — in fact, there was a slight cooling throughout much of the country …

EU to build more terminals to import US LNG

by P. Shrestha, July 27, 2018 in EnergyLiveNews


The European Union plans to import more liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the US to diversify its energy supply.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said more terminals will be built in the region during his visit to the White House this week.

He met with President Donald Trump yesterday to launch a new phase in the relationship between the US and the EU, including strengthening their co-operation on energy.

See also in CNBC

The Seattle Tacoma Airport Temperature Sensor is Running Too Warm: Again

by Cliff Mass, July 25, 2018 in CliffMassWeatherCimateBlog


There appears to be a problem with the temperature sensor at Seattle-Tacoma Airport:  it seems to be running several degrees too warm.

This is not the first time this has happened.   And excessively warm temperatures at airport stations seems to be a growth industry around here.   In a previous blog I talked about the problem at Yakima–which has been fixed.   Ellensburg is running too warm as well.

But this blog will be about Seattle-Tacoma Airport, whose official NWS/FAA temperature sensor is located between two of the runways.

Why should you care about this? 

New Paper: 54% Of ‘Vulnerable’ SW Pacific Islands Studied Had Shorelines That EXPANDED From 2005-2015

by Kenneth Richard, July 26, 2018 in NoTricksZone


Despite a rapid local sea level rise rate nearly 3 times the global mean (1.8 mm/yr), 15 of 28 studied atoll islands in the southwest Pacific increased in shoreline area during 2005 to 2015 according to a new study (Hisabayashi et al., 2018). For the 3 islands that experienced extreme shoreline erosion – with one atoll island even “disappearing” – a Category 5 cyclone was identified as the most likely causal factor. 
Consequently, the authors conclude that “the dramatic impacts of climate change felt on coastlines and people across the Pacific are still anecdotal.

Stop the Climate Change Dystopia

by Michelle Stirling, July 28, 2018 in Medium


What’s wrong with comparing Super Storm Sandy’s devastation with projected sea level rise? They are two different things! One is a storm surge, the other an incremental change in either sea level or land subsidence (sinking) or both. For one we can evacuate the immediate area where landfall is forecast to hit in order to save lives. For the other, we have the time to build dikes and barriers like those in England and Holland, or flood-proof, or move. Super Storm Sandy is not unprecedented, and neither are extremely stormy and erratic periods of climate with catastrophic storms, like the Grote Mandrenke — The Great Drowning of Men — of the Little Ice Age. Let me set some perspective.

The truth behind the Baffin Bay starving polar bear video is worse than we thought

by P. Homewood, July 263, 2018 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat


Remember that video of an emaciated Baffin Island polar bear that went viral last December? In an unexpected follow-up (“Starving-Polar-Bear Photographer Recalls What Went Wrong“; National Geographic, August 2018 issue), photographer Cristina Mittermeier makes some astonishing admissions that might just make you sick.

Susan Crockford uncovers the truth behind that “starving polar bear video”

Swallowed Islands: Getting Sea Level Rise Out of Variability

by Kip Hansen, July 26, 2018 in WUWT


Author’s Note:

Journalists should do their job.  They should check the most pertinent facts for themselves — in this case:  Is sea level really rising 7-10 mm/yr in the Solomons?

Finding out that it hasn’t and isn’t makes a much more interesting story than “yet-another-alarmist-talking-point”.

Do note that while coral atolls are generally self-regenerating, sand spits/sand bars are not — they are at the mercy of the currents and waves.

Thanks for reading.

La terrible canicule de l’été 1911 qui provoqua 40 000 morts

by Pierre Bienvault, 22 juin 2017 in LaCroix


Encore dans toutes les mémoires, la canicule de 2003 et ses 15 000 morts n’a pas été la plus meurtrière de la France du XXe siècle.

 Il faudra marquer cette année 1911 d’une croix noire. » Voilà ce qu’écrivait, à la fin de l’été, un médecin du département de la Seine inférieure. À l’évidence traumatisé par les conséquences de la terrible vague de chaleur qui frappa alors, de juillet à septembre, toute l’Europe mais surtout la France et la Belgique. « Pendant la longue période de chaleur, la mort n’a cessé de faucher les tout-petits élevés au biberon », ajoutera ce médecin.

Une canicule de juillet à septembre

Encore dans toutes les mémoires, la canicule de 2003 et ses 15 000 morts n’a pas été la plus meurtrière en France. C’est ce que rappelait Catherine Rollet dans un article (1) paru en 2010. Cette historienne et démographe, décédée en décembre 2016, y racontait la dramatique canicule de l’été 1911.

Pielke Jr. – U.S. Tornado damage continues to fall, 2018 activity near record lows

by A. Watts, July 25, 2018 in WUWT


For those that are sure there’s global warming driving tornadoes and other severe weather events, here’s some inconvenient news. Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. has updated his tornado loss data via his Twitter account. He writes:

2017 update to our normalized US tornado losses based on our 2013 paper:

German Scientists: Chris Folland’s Findings On Climate Models “Good For a Loud Laugh”…”Pulling Tricks Like Troopers”

by Dr S. Lüning and Prof. F. Vahrenholt, July 25, 2018 in NoTricksZone


The temperature of the last 100 years was also the topic of a new publication by Folland et al. 2018. The authors are very much at home in the camp of the IPCC and had to admit that there have been phases of cooling, stagnating or even slow warming: 1896 – 1910, 1941 – 1975, and 1998 – 2013.

Climate models struggle with this because CO2 is climbing steadily. So why does climate warming stall under these conditions? Folland and his colleagues examined the models and are convinced that despite the small problems, the models function perfectly well and thus no other climate factors need to be accounted for.

In 1940s it was a bit too warm and the models were unable to reproduce this. Given, the authors say. Greenhouse gases have been responsible for almost all the warming of the last 125 years.

Now isn’t it a bit odd that the authors made absolutely no mention of the ocean cycles in the abstract? As our regular readers know, the ocean cycles run surprisingly synchronous with the fluctuations in global temperatures, i.e. the key factors here are the AMO and PDO.

PDO ocean cycle and its fluctuations in the global temperature development. Source: Book ‘Die kalte Sonne‘.

Charlatans Of The Arctic… Laughing Stock Ice-Free-Arctic Predictions …Fake Science At Its Best

by P. Gosselin, July 21, 2018 in NoTricksZone


Recently climate catastrophe non-believers have been pointing out that Arctic sea ice volume has been gaining over the past years and has not trended downward for some dozen years now.

And global warming alarmists have been very silent on the subject of climate change now that global surface temperatures have cooled and Arctic and Greenland snow and ice have rebounded.

Embarrassed, they don’t want to be reminded of all the absurd predictions they made 10 years ago, with some as recently as just five years ago.

The Medusae Fossae Formation as the single largest source of dust on Mars

by L. Ojha et al., July 20, 2018 in NatureCommunications (open access)


Transport of fine-grained dust is one of the most widespread sedimentary processes occurring on Mars today. In the present climate, eolian abrasion and deflation of rocks are likely the most pervasive and active dust-forming mechanism. Martian dust is globally enriched in S and Cl and has a distinct mean S:Cl ratio. Here we identify a potential source region for Martian dust based on analysis of elemental abundance data …

How the Little Ice Age affected South American climate

by Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo, July 24, 2018 in ScienceDaily


A new study published in Geophysical Research Journal shows that the so-called Little Ice Age — a period stretching from 1500 to 1850 in which mean temperatures in the northern hemisphere were considerably lower than at present — exerted effects on the climate of South America.

Based on an analysis of speleothems (cave formations) in the Brazilian states of Mato Grosso do Sul and Goiás, the study revealed that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the climate of southwestern Brazil was wetter than it is now, for example, while that of the country’s Northeast region was drier.

The same Brazilian cave records showed that the climate was drier in Brazil between 900 and 1100, during a period known as the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA), when the northern hemisphere’s climate was warmer than it is now.

 

Fiji ‘Flooding’ is Fake News from #COP23

by Nils-Axel Mörner, November 13, 2017 in WUWT


These are the facts

  • Sea level has remained virtually at the present level over the last 200 years
  • In the last 50-70 years sea level has remained perfectly stable in Fiji
  • This stability is indicated by the growth of corals (stopped to grow vertically, and forced to grow laterally into microatolls) – and corals do not lie

We have (with references at the end)

o Studied your tide gauge records – Mörner & Matlack-Kelin, 2017a

o Studied sites of coastal erosion – Mörner & Matlack-Klein, 2017b

o Documented sea level change during the last 500 years in great details –

Mörner & Matlakc.Kelin, 2917c

o Noted the close similarity to similar records in nations like the Maldives,

Bangladesh and India – Mörner, 2017

o We have presented our data at conferences in Rome (4th WCCC, October 19-21, 2017) and Düsseldorf (11th EIKE, November 9-10, 2017) – see: Clutz, 2017 and Tallbloke’s Talkshop, 2017)

Study: abrupt shifts occurred in the ancient European climate

by A. Watts, July 23, 2018 in WUWT and NatureCommunications


From the University of Helsinki and the “no SUV’s needed” department comes this study which suggests big cold snaps occurred right in the middle of the warm Eemian period. My only concern is perhaps they over-rely on climate models. For reference (and not part of the study) here’s the Eemian graph in context. Data sources listed int he graph.

Global Temperature Rise Some 75% Lower Than Models Projected!

by P. Gosselin, July 18, 2018 in NoTricksZone


No matter how hard climate-catastrophe obsessed alarmists attempt to beat out a little doom from the data, their results still fall far way short of their projections. Moreover, the modest warming the planet has seen over the recent decades is tied more to natural cycles.

Chart: P Gosselin, using WoodForTrees data.

IPCC’s Kangaroo Science…To Ignore Over 600 Papers Confirming Major Solar Impact On Climate

by P. Gosselin, July 17, 2018 in NoTricksZone


The upcoming 6th IPCC Sixth Assessment Report will be a “comprehensive assessment of the science” related to climate change and published in 2022. However, don’t expect it to be “comprehensive” at all as hundreds of scientific publications showing profound impacts by sun and oceans will go ignored.

Climate science has turned into a religion that centers on a single act of faith. Human CO2 is changing our climate.

In the past it was always understood that climate was impacted by a vast array of factors, such oceanic cycles, solar cycles, aerosols, cloud cover, etc. to name a few.

Images: NASA (public domain)

Lightning strikes occur in time with the spinning Sun in 150 year old Japanese farm records

by Jo Nova, July 19, 2018 in JoNova


Remarkably, some Japanese families kept weather record diaries in the 1700 and 1800s, and some for as long as 150 years. The connections they reveal are tantalizing but so incomplete. We are trying to fish out primitive signals from murky water. The Sun turns around on itself every 27 days, so these researchers are looking for repeating patterns in lightning that fit, but the poles of the sun spin slower than the equator and the sun spots can take their own time. Hence, it’s not a neat “27″ days.

During periods of high solar activity, they found regular peaks in lightning activity with the right timing, from May to September when the cold Siberian air mass is not so influential.

Other studies we’ve discussed here have investigated long solar cycles on the 11 year or 200 year scales ….

BBC’s Fake Heat Record Claims

by P. Homewood, July 22, 2018 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat


Last week, the BBC seriously misled the public about so-called “heat records”, as I noted in this post here.

In particular the BBC made a song and dance about Southern California, even though the LA records were seriously compromised by siting in car parks or next to air conditioning exhaust vents.

But how does the recent Californian heatwave really compare with historical weather?

Fairmont is a rural USHCN station, just 110 km north of LA, and with a long term record dating back to 1922. (There is some data going back to 1909 as well):

(…)

The State of the World’s Beaches

by Arjen Luijendijk et al., April, 27, 2018 in Nature (Open Access)


Coastal zones constitute one of the most heavily populated and developed land zones in the world. Despite the utility and economic benefits that coasts provide, there is no reliable global-scale assessment of historical shoreline change trends. Here, via the use of freely available optical satellite images captured since 1984, in conjunction with sophisticated image interrogation and analysis methods, we present a global-scale assessment of the occurrence of sandy beaches and rates of shoreline change therein. Applying pixel-based supervised classification, we found that 31% of the world’s ice-free shoreline are sandy. The application of an automated shoreline detection method to the sandy shorelines thus identified resulted in a global dataset of shoreline change rates for the 33 year period 1984–2016. Analysis of the satellite derived shoreline data indicates that 24% of the world’s sandy beaches are eroding at rates exceeding 0.5 m/yr, while 28% are accreting and 48% are stable. The majority of the sandy shorelines in marine protected areas are eroding, raising cause for serious concern.