Trees and climate change: Faster growth, lighter wood

by Technical University of Munich (TUM), August 14, 2018


Wood density of European trees decreasing continuously since 1870

Trees are growing more rapidly due to climate change. This sounds like good news. After all, this means that trees are storing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in their wood and hence taking away the key ingredient in global warming. But is it that simple? A team analyzed wood samples from the oldest existing experimental areas spanning a period of 150 years — and reached a surprising conclusion.

But the most important finding for practical and political aspects is that the current climate-relevant carbon sequestration of the forests is being overestimated as long as it is calculated with established but outdated wood densities. “The accelerated growth is still resulting in surplus carbon sequestration,” says Pretzsch. “But scaling up for the forests of central Europe, the traditional estimate would be to high by about ten million metric tons of carbon per year.”

Blow to warmists, the proposed ‘Anthropocene’ epoch has been denied by ICS

by Anthony Watts, August 13, 2018 in WUWT


The global body tasked with naming geological eras, the International Commission on Stratigraphy, has rejected the proposed Anthropocene epoch,  the controversial ‘geological’ epoch in which mankind allegedly dominates natural processes. The international commission has now rejected the proposal and has instead split the Holocene Epoch into three different geological ages, all of which were primarily shaped by natural, not human factors.

See also here

Some Good News—About Natural Disasters, of All Things

by Dr. R. Pielke, August 14, 2018 in ClimateChangeDispatch


In his posthumously published book “Factfulness,” the Swedish statistician Hans Rosling describes a paradox: “The image of a dangerous world has never been broadcast more effectively than it is now, while the world has never been less violent and more safe.”

A case in point: natural disasters. The earth will always be volatile, but despite recent fires, volcanoes, and hurricanes, humanity currently is experiencing a stretch of good fortune when it comes to disasters.

It’s difficult to be “factful” about disasters—the vivid trauma of each event distracts observers from the long-term decrease in destructiveness.

But climate activists make the problem worse by blaming every extreme weather event on human-caused climate change, hoping to scare people into elevated concern.

Germany’s Renewable Energy Disaster – Part 2: Wind & Solar Deemed ‘Ecological Disasters’

by ‘Stop These Things‘, August 14, 2018


Germany’s wind and solar experiment has failed: the so-called ‘Energiewende’ (energy transition) has turned into an insanely costly debacle.

German power prices have rocketedblackouts and load shedding are the norm; and its idyllic countryside has been turned into an industrial wasteland, with its forests, no exception (see above).

Hundreds of billions of euros have been squandered on subsidies to wind and solar, all in an effort to reduce carbon dioxide gas emissions. However, that objective has failed too: CO2 emissions continue to rise.

Evaluation du coût de blackout dans l’Union Européenne

by Ernest Mund, 13 aoüt 2018, in ScienceClimatEnergie


La fourniture d’électricité est essentielle au développement économique d’une nation et à son harmonie politique et sociale. Les profondes mutations subies actuellement par le système électrique dans lequel la part des énergies renouvelables intermittentes ne cesse d’augmenter, présentent des risques pour cette fourniture. Il importe d’en assurer la sécurité. Evaluer le coût d’un blackout est donc un élément d’information essentiel, qui devrait être pris en compte dans toute décision future d’investissement en matière de génération de puissance.

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Laughable weather station maintenance causes highest ever temperature record in Spain

by Anthony Watts, August 6, 2018 in WUWT


h/t to Dr. Ryan Maue

In Spain, Paco Eslava García has been following my lead on the poor quality of weather stations that produce record-high temperatures. I recently pointed out how the tentative all time high temperature in Africa could very well be due to being at an airport. I also pointed out that high temperature records in the Los Angeles area could be a product of poor siting. Such as this station on the roof of the Santa Ana fire station:

The rise of Climate superstition: Droughts, heatwaves, random noise is “proof” of anything you like

by JoNova, August 7, 2018


All around the world the climate druids are at work.

Show me the error bars

Once upon a time a scientist talked about thirty year trends and anachronistic things like “confidence intervals”. Now, thanks to the discovery of Unscience, any noisy, random short data is fair game to be declared undeniable climate change. Periods of flooding also qualify, as do periods of nice weather, though strangely no one mentions those. Where are the headlines? If climate change caused drought on the East Coast of Australia, it’s also causing average rain and good crops in Western Australia.

In terms of scientific data analysis we don’t get that many droughts or six-day-August-heatwaves to analyze. They’re complex phenomena caused by multiple factors and we only have short records. This makes them ideal to be oversold to hapless folk as a “sign” of climate change.

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The Major Change in the Global Warming Groupthink Between 1990 and 1995

byTim Ball, August 12, 2018 in WUWT


Somebody said economists try to predict the tide by measuring one wave. This puts them in the same league as climate scientists trying to predict the climate by measuring one variable, CO2. It is no surprise that an amalgam of the two, climate and economics, produces even worse results, but that is what happened early in the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) deception.

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Ice sheets of the last ice age seeded the ocean with essential nutrient silica

by University of Bristol, August 10, 2018 in ScienceDaily


Silica is needed by a group of marine algae (the microscopic plants of the oceans) called diatoms, who use it to build their glassy cell walls (known as frustules).

These plankton take up globally significant amounts of carbon — they remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere via photosynthesis, and act as a natural carbon sink when they die and fall to the bottom of the ocean — and form the base of the marine food chain.

The researchers are also planning to use more complex and realistic computer models to delve deeper into the potential changes in the global silica cycle since the last glacial maximum. These might include more accurate representations of ocean currents, recycling of silica in the water column, and potential changes to the marine algal community.

A Global Warming Hiatus in Northeast China

by Sun X. et al., 2018 in CO2Science


Paper Reviewed
Sun, X., Ren, G., Ren, Y., Fang, Y., Liu, Y., Xue, X. and Zhang, P. 2018. A remarkable climate warming hiatus over northeast China since 1998. Theoretical and Applied Climatology 133: 579-594.

A prominent feature of all climate model projections is their prediction that temperatures should be rising in response to ever-increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases. However, for the past two decades global surface air temperatures have not warmed to the degree predicted by the models, which lack of warming has been a conundrum to the climate alarmist movement.

Le CO2 et le climat avec et sans effet de serre

by Georges Geuskens, 6 août 2018 in ScienceClimatEnergie


De tous temps les hommes se sont intéressés au climat et ont tenté de prévoir son évolution. Dès l’Antiquité il était connu que des caractéristiques géographiques comme la latitude mais aussi l’altitude ou le voisinage de vastes étendues d’eau avaient une grande influence sur le climat. Sur cette base les climatologues ont été amenés à distinguer différents types de climats tels que tropical, désertique, tempéré, polaire, etc. Ensuite, il est progressivement apparu que le climat est un système extrêmement complexe qui dépend de l’activité solaire ainsi que de  la distance et de l’orientation de la Terre par rapport au Soleil, facteurs qui varient à des échelles de temps très différentes.

Climate Scientist Calls Out Media (and Mann) ‘Misinformation’ On Wildfires And Global Warming

by Michaele Bastach, August 10, 2018 in WUWT


With wildfires engulfing over 620,000 acres of California, there’s been a concerted media campaign to single out man-made global warming as the primary force behind the deadly blazes.

But that’s not what the data suggests, according to University of Washington climate scientist Cliff Mass.

“So there is a lot of misinformation going around in the media, some environmental advocacy groups, and some politicians,” Mass wrote in the first of a series of blog posts analyzing the California wildfires.

“Back to the future of climate change”

by Anthony Watts, August 10, 2018 in WUWT


Syracuse University professor uses ancient marine sediment as benchmark for present, future climate models

SYRACUSE, N.Y. – Researchers at Syracuse University are looking to the geologic past to make future projections about climate change.

Christopher K. Junium, assistant professor of Earth sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), is the lead author of a study that uses the nitrogen isotopic composition of sediments to understand changes in marine conditions during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM)–a brief period of rapid global warming approximately 56 million years ago.

Junium’s team–which includes Benjamin T. Uveges G’17, a Ph.D. candidate in A&S, and Alexander J. Dickson, a lecturer in geochemistry at Royal Holloway at the University of London–has published an article on the subject in Nature Communications (Springer Nature, 2018).

Growth In Thermal Generation Continues To Outpace Renewables In China

by P. Homewood, August 9, 2018 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

Anybody who thinks China is rapidly shifting to renewable energy needs to look at the latest electricity data from the China Energy Portal.

Whilst wind and solar generation has increased by 51 TWh year-on-year in Q2, thermal has increased by 176.9 TWh.

https://chinaenergyportal.org/2018-q2-electricity-and-energy-statistics/

Multiple NASA Studies Confirm Bedrock Heat Flow Behind Melting Polar Ice, Not Global Warming

by James E. Kamis, August 7, 2018 in ClimateChangeDisatch


In what amounts to dissension from National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) climate change policy, a series of just-released studies by working-level scientists prove that geological and not atmospheric forces are responsible for melting of Earth’s polar ice sheets.

La canicule d’ici et l’hiver de là By: Martin Pettitt – CC BY 2.0

by Martin Pettitt, 8 août 2018, in Contrepoints


S’exprimer, sans recul, sur une canicule localisée à l’échelle du climat mondial constitue une erreur déontologique.

Il est regrettable que certains utilisent la vague de chaleur actuelle — qui au demeurant n’a rien d’anormal — afin de faire de nouveau miroiter la catastrophe climatique annoncée depuis 1992.

Le livre Des changements dans le climat de la France : histoire de ses révolutions météorologiques, du Dr Fuster, est sorti en 1845, alors qu’on ne produisait pas encore de pétrole. Dans ces 500 pages richement documentées, l’auteur passe en revue les aléas du climat en France depuis la conquête de la Gaule par Jules César jusqu’à son époque.

Voici quelques exemples tirés de ce livre, afin de montrer que la canicule que nous vivons n’a absolument rien d’anormal …

Tornadoes : Historical Records and Trends

by NOAA, August 2018


One of the main difficulties with tornado records is that a tornado, or evidence of a tornado must have been observed. Unlike rainfall or temperature, which may be measured by a fixed instrument, tornadoes are short-lived and very unpredictable. If a tornado occurs in a place with few or no people, it is not likely to be documented. Many significant tornadoes may not make it into the historical record since Tornado Alley was very sparsely populated during the 20th century.

Much early work on tornado climatology in the United States was done by John Park Finley in his book Tornadoes, published in 1887. While some of Finley’s safety guidelines have since been refuted as dangerous practices, the book remains a seminal work in tornado research. The University of Oklahoma created a PDF copy of the book and made it accessible at John Finley’s Tornadoes(link is external)

See also here

Hothouse Earth

by P. Homewood, August 7, 2018 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat


Climate change: ‘Hothouse Earth’ risks even if CO2 emissions slashed

It may sound like the title of a low budget sci-fi movie, but for planetary scientists, “Hothouse Earth” is a deadly serious concept.

Researchers believe we could soon cross a threshold leading to boiling hot temperatures and towering seas in the centuries to come.

Even if countries succeed in meeting their CO2 targets, we could still lurch on to this “irreversible pathway”.

Their study shows it could happen if global temperatures rise by 2C.

The utterly corrupt body of climate science has been getting ever more desperate to scare people about climate change and thereby submit to their radical anti capitalist agenda.

People are not falling for it, so we are now being subjected to ever more absurd announcements like this.

See also here

US Instrumental Records Indicate More Heat Waves Occurred In the 1930s Than Today

by K. Richard, August 6, 2018 in NoTricksZone


During the 1930s, when the atmospheric CO2 concentration was about 100 ppm lower than today (310 ppm vs. 410 ppm), United States heat waves were just as if not more common than recent decades.

Recently there has been much ado about heat waves and the hottest-ever-recorded-temperatures making their rounds in Northern Hemisphere summer.

Yet scientists have determined that heat waves are largely driven by natural variability, not anthropogenic CO2 emissions.

..

Science studies say heatwaves were more common in USA during the 1930’s

by Anthony Watts, August 6, 2018 in WUWT


During the 1930s, when the atmospheric CO2 concentration was about 100 ppm lower than today (310 ppm vs. 410 ppm), United States heat waves were just as if not more common than recent decades.

Recently there has been much ado about heat waves and the hottest-ever-recorded-temperatures making their rounds in Northern Hemisphere summer.

Yet scientists have determined that heat waves are largely driven by natural variability, not anthropogenic CO2 emissions.

Climat : quand Nicolas Hulot joue à vous faire peur

by Samuele Furfari, 7 août 2018 in Contrepoints


Quelle aubaine pour les doctrinaires du développement durable ! Au moment de leur jour du dépassement il fait chaud, très chaud. Évidement ni l’écologisteHulot, ni France 2, ni France 24, ni la RTBF ni la ribambelle de médias impréparés ne pouvaient rater pareille occasion pour lier les deux évènements et nous culpabiliser pour introduire le contrôle de tous les détails de nos vies.

Ce premier août était donc le jour où, d’après Global Footprint Network (GFN), qui possède l’argent pour employer des dizaines de chercheurs souvent financés par les deniers publics, nous vivons désormais à crédit. À sa suite, toutes les ONG environnementales (ONGE) et nombre de politiciens se font les mégaphones de cette supercherie qui ne repose sur aucune base scientifique. Le jour du dépassement global (earth overshooting day) prétend être un indicateur dont l’objectif est de conscientiser et responsabiliser les pays développés à la notion d’empreinte écologique. Bien entendu, à part les Européens endoctrinés par les ONGE, cette théorie n’a guère d’écho dans le reste du monde.

 

‘This Is How Global Warming Will Play Out:’ 1931 Ocean Temp Record Broken By…0.2 Degrees?

by Mike Bastach, August 5, 2018 in WUWT


….

But while Scripps is trying to tie the record-high ocean reading to the broader wave of media coverage on global heat waves, there are a few caveats to note about what the scientists found.

First, these measurements are taken from a pier that’s near the shoreline, which would not necessarily make it representative of the entire Pacific Ocean, and therefore easily influenced by local weather events.

The “anomalously warm temperatures for the past week” that Scripps researchers observed at their pier somewhat mirror the temperature pattern in 1931, and indeed, the daily records broken in the past week have been very close to readings from 87 years ago.

There is an upward trend in temperature readings from Scripps’ pier, but the trend seems to also broadly coincide with the flipping of a natural ocean cycle, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, to its warm phase. That flip occurred around 1976.