by Matt McGraph, September 27, 2018 in BBCNews
Building work has restarted at hundreds of Chinese coal-fired power stations, according to an analysis of satellite imagery.
The research, carried out by green campaigners CoalSwarm, suggests that 259 gigawatts of new capacity are under development in China.
The authors say this is the same capacity to produce electricity as the entire US coal fleet.
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See also here
by The Middlelbury Community Network, September 2018
Editor’s Introductory Note: Our planet has been slowly warming since last emerging from the “Little Ice Age” of the 17th century, often associated with the Maunder Minimum. Before that came the “Medieval Warm Period“, in which temperatures were about the same as they are today. Both of these climate phenomena are known to have occurred in the Northern Hemisphere, but several hundred years prior to the present, the majority of the Southern Hemisphere was primarily populated by indigenous peoples, where science and scientific observation was limited to non-existent. Thus we can not say that these periods were necessarily “global”.
However, “Global Warming” in recent historical times has been an undisputable fact, and no one can reasonably deny that.
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Summary – Exactly what have we learned here?
| 1. The “Greenhouse Effect” is a natural and valuable phenomenon, without which, the planet would be uninhabitable.2. Modest Global Warming, at least up until 1998 when a cooling trend began, has been real.
3. CO2 is not a significant greenhouse gas; 95% of the contribution is due to Water Vapor. 4. Man’s contribution to Greenhouse Gasses is relatively insignificant. We didn’t cause the recent Global Warming and we cannot stop it. 5. Solar Activity appears to be the principal driver for Climate Change, accompanied by complex ocean currents which distribute the heat and control local weather systems. 6. CO2 is a useful trace gas in the atmosphere, and the planet would actually benefit by having more, not less of it, because it is not a driver for Global Warming and would enrich our vegetation, yielding better crops to feed the expanding population. 7. CO2 is not causing global warming, in fact, CO2 is lagging temperature change in all reliable datasets. The cart is not pulling the donkey, and the future cannot influence the past. 8. Nothing happening in the climate today is particularly unusual, and in fact has happened many times in the past and will likely happen again in the future. 9. The UN IPCC has corrupted the “reporting process” so badly, it makes the oil-for-food scandal look like someone stole some kid’s lunch money. They do not follow the Scientific Method, and modify the science as needed to fit their predetermined conclusions. In empirical science, one does NOT write the conclusion first, then solicit “opinion” on the report, ignoring any opinion which does not fit their predetermined conclusion while falsifying data to support unrealistic models. 10. Polar Bear populations are not endangered, in fact current populations are healthy and at almost historic highs. The push to list them as endangered is an effort to gain political control of their habitat… particularly the North Slope oil fields. 11. There is no demonstrated causal relationship between hurricanes and/or tornadoes and global warming. This is sheer conjecture totally unsupported by any material science. 12. Observed glacial retreats in certain select areas have been going on for hundreds of years, and show no serious correlation to short-term swings in global temperatures. 13. Greenland is shown to be an island completely surrounded by water, not ice, in maps dating to the 14th century. There is active geothermal activity in the currently “melting” sections of Greenland. 14. The Antarctic Ice cover is currently the largest ever observed by satellite, and periodic ice shelf breakups are normal and correlate well with localized tectonic and geothermal activity along the Antarctic Peninsula. 15. The Global Warming Panic was triggered by an artifact of poor mathematics which has been thoroughly disproved. The panic is being deliberately nurtured by those who stand to gain both financially and politically from perpetuation of the hoax. 16. Scientists who “deny” the hoax are often threatened with loss of funding or even their jobs. 17. The correlation between solar activity and climate is now so strong that solar physicists are now seriously discussing the much greater danger of pending global cooling. 18. Biofuel hysteria is already having a disastrous effect on world food supplies and prices, and current technologies for biofuel production consume more energy than the fuels produce. 19. Global Warming Hysteria is potentially linked to a stress-induced mental disorder. 20. In short, there is no “climate crisis” of any kind at work on our planet. |
by Louisiana State University, September 25, 2018 in ScienceDaily
More than 26,000 years ago, sea level was much lower than it is today partly because the ice sheets that jut out from the continent of Antarctica were enormous and covered by grounded ice — ice that was fully attached to the seafloor. As the planet warmed, the ice sheets melted and contracted, and sea level began to rise. Researchers have discovered new information that illuminates how and when this global phenomenon occurred.
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More recently in 2002, in the northern part of Antarctica called the Antarctic Peninsula, the Larsen Ice Shelf collapsed. The collapse of this ice shelf quickly led to inland glaciers buttressed by the Larsen Ice Shelf to break up and melt. Scientists have thought that a similar process could have occurred when the Ross Ice Shelf collapsed thousands of years ago in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
However, Bart and colleagues from the University of South Florida, Auburn University and the Polish Academy of Sciences found that there was a centuries-long delay from when the Ross Ice Shelf collapsed and the grounded ice began to contract. In the Ross Sea, the delay was between 200 to 1,400 years later. This new information adds a layer of complexity for sea level rise computer simulations and predictions.
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by Kip Hansen, September 25, 2018 in WUWT
It seems that every time we turn around, we are presented with a new Science Fact that such-and-so metric — Sea Level Rise, Global Average Surface Temperature, Ocean Heat Content, Polar Bear populations, Puffin populations — has changed dramatically — “It’s unprecedented!” — and these statements are often backed by a graph illustrating the sharp rise (or, in other cases, sharp fall) as the anomaly of the metric from some baseline. In most cases, the anomaly is actually very small and the change is magnified by cranking up the y-axis to make this very small change appear to be a steep rise (or fall).
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by R. McKitrick and J. Christy, July 6, 2018 in AGU100
AbstractOverall climate sensitivity to CO2doubling in a general circulation model results from a complexsystem of parameterizations in combination with the underlying model structure. We refer to this as the model’smajor hypothesis, and we assume it to be testable. We explain four criteria that a valid test should meet: measurability, specificity, independence, and uniqueness. We argue that temperature change in thetropical 200- to 300-hPa layer meets these criteria. Comparing modeled to observed trends over the past60 years using a persistence-robust variance estimator shows that all models warm more rapidly thanobservations and in the majority of individual cases the discrepancy is statistically significant. We argue thatthis provides informative evidence against the major hypothesis in most current climate models.…