by Tilak Doshi, June 7, 2019 in Forbes
The reigning narrative of impending global environmental catastrophe dominates the airwaves and print media. Short of a drastic reduction in the use of fossil fuels, it is asserted, we are fast approaching the “end of days”. The demonization of fossils fuels in general, and coal in particular, has been wrought under pressure from special interests groups and organized lobbies of the climate-industrial complex where aspects of economic reality are caricatured or presented out of context. Complex trade-offs in energy policy are spun into tales of spurious simplicity, leading to misleading conclusions. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the debate over the role of coal-fueled power generation in Asia.
Opposition to the building of coal power plants in the poorer countries has been justified by environmental activists, banks and multilateral development agencies such as the World Bank in two key ways. The first revolves around the claim that climate change mitigation programs carry “co-benefits” for public health in developing countries. The second utilizes the assertion that renewable energy such as solar and wind power are effective substitutes for centralized grid electricity generated by fossil fuels.
Climate change policy does not help the poor
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by Affolter et al., June 5, 2019 in ScienceAdvance
Abstract
The reasons for the early Holocene temperature discrepancy between northern hemispheric model simulations and paleoclimate reconstructions—known as the Holocene temperature conundrum—remain unclear. Using hydrogen isotopes of fluid inclusion water extracted from stalagmites from the Milandre Cave in Switzerland, we established a mid-latitude European mean annual temperature reconstruction for the past 14,000 years. Our Milandre Cave fluid inclusion temperature record (MC-FIT) resembles Greenland and Mediterranean sea surface temperature trends but differs from recent reconstructions obtained from biogenic proxies and climate models. The water isotopes are further synchronized with tropical precipitation records, stressing the Northern Hemisphere signature. Our results support the existence of a European Holocene Thermal Maximum and data-model temperature discrepancies. Moreover, data-data comparison reveals a significant latitudinal temperature gradient within Europe. Last, the MC-FIT record suggests that seasonal biases in the proxies are not the primary cause of the Holocene temperature conundrum.
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by Willis Eschenbach, June 8, 2019 in WUWT
Due to the recent posts by Lord Monkton and Nick Stokes, I’ve been thinking about the relationship between radiation and temperature. So I turned to the CERES dataset. Here is a scatterplot of the monthly global average surface temperature versus the monthly global average downwelling total radiation absorbed by the surface. The total radiation is the sum of the net solar radiation at the surface and the downwelling longwave radiation at the surface. I’ve removed the seasonal variations from the data.
Note that 3.7 W/m2 is the increase in downwelling longwave radiation expected from a doubling of CO2 …
When I saw that, I thought well, maybe the increase is small because there’s a lag between the absorption of the radiation and the warming. To see if that was the case, I did a cross-correlation analysis of the relationship.
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La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse
