Archives mensuelles : septembre 2019

climate-debate

WMO Secretary-General Warns Against Climate ‘Doomsters and Extremists’

by  Anthony Watts, Sep. 6, 2019 in WUWT

London, 6 September: The General-Secretary of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says that the alarmist narrative on climate change has gone off the rails and criticised the news media for provoking unjustified anxiety.

Speaking to Finland’s financial newspaper Talouselämä (“The Journal”) on 6 September 2019, Petteri Taalas called for cooler heads to prevail, saying that he does not accept arguments of climate alarmists that the end of the world is at hand.

Dr Taalas also spoke of the dangers of green extremism:

“While climate sceptisism has become less of an issue, now we are being challenged from the other side. Climate experts have been attacked by these people and they claim that we should be much more radical. They are doomsters and extremists; they make threats.”

And he called for the media both to challenge experts and allow a broader range of opinions to be heard.

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climate-debate

The Gestalt of Heat Waves

by Clyde Spencer, Sep. 6, 2019 in WUWT

Abstract

Tmax and Tmin time-series are examined to look for historical, empirical evidence to support the claim that heat waves will become more frequent, of longer duration, and with higher temperatures than in the past. The two primary parameters examined are the coefficient of variation and the difference between Tmax and Tmin. There have been periods in the past when heat waves were more common. However, for nearly the last 30 years, there has been a reversal of the correlation of increasing CO2 concentration with the Tmax coefficient of variation. The reversal in differences in Tmax and Tmin indicate something notable happened around 1990.

Introduction

There was much in the press this Summer about the ‘global’ heat waves, particularly in France and Greenland. For an example of some of the pronouncements, see here. The predictions are that we should expect to see heat waves that are more frequent and more severe because of Anthropogenic Global Warming, now more commonly called “Climate Change.” The basis for the claim is unvalidated Global Climate Models, which are generally accepted to be running to warm. The simplistic rationale is that as the nights cool less, it takes less heating the next day to reach unusually high temperatures. Unfortunately, were that true, that would lead one to conclude that heat waves should never stop.

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Fig. 1. U.S. Annual Heat Wave Index, 1895-2015

https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-high-and-low-temperatures

If the predictions of worse future heat waves were valid, one might expect to be able to discern a change occurring already, inasmuch as it is commonly accepted that Earth has been warming at least since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution

climate-debate

Historical European Sea Level Records

by Kip Hansen, Sep. 6, 2019 in WUWT

I have been working on another sea level related essay and in the process stumbled upon a paper published in 1990 by thePermanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL).  The title is: “On The Availability Of  European Mean Sea Level Data  by P.L. Woodworth, N.E. Spencer and G. Alcock  (1990)”,  The paper is listed on the PSMSL page of “Publications Relevant to the PSMSL and GLOSS” but is not available there.  [ a  .pdf is available here  courtesy of the library at the University of New Brunswick, Canada ].

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climate-debate

Recent global heat waves are correlated to an exceptional solar cycle 24

by J. Van Vliet, Sep. 5, 2019 in ScienceClimatEnergie

Belgium and France were recently affected by an extreme heat wave that took place between 24 and 27 July 2019. This heat wave was in many aspects presented as unprecedented and it has therefore unlocked a large scale reaction by many media. After a few days to cool down, the time has come to express a non-emotional and non-political opinion about such a strong heat wave.

Emotional reactions were normal in such circumstances: the temperatures were extreme and even if France and Belgium were much better prepared that for the 2003 heat wave, the present heat wave has led to important suffering for many poor people or people in bad health and without access to air conditioning.

The heat wave unlocked also many political reactions: it was an opportunity to press once more the threatening mantra of United Nations[1] and IPCC that mankind is responsible for this catastrophic warming and is destroying its own and only planet. A whole caste of politicians, countless academics and so-called “experts”, lobbyists, bureaucrats and NGOs claim that it is urgent to take “strong” measures going up to the replacement of democracy by climatist[2] despotism: even children are enlisted in the political arena. These people number in hundreds of thousands and probably more and they communicate loudly and repeatedly at the UN, through IPCC reports and COP events, in the media and in the streets. Does this imply they are right ? Has mankind something to do with these high temperatures ?

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climate-debate

Medieval Warmth Was GLOBAL…Confirmed By Over 1,200 Papers At Google Maps

by P. Gosselin, Sep. 3, 2019 in ClimateChangeDispatch

More than 1,200 publications show the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was global – an embarrassment to global warming alarmists who claimed it was regional.

Global-warming-alarmist scientists like claiming that the well-documented Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was mostly a regional, North Atlantic phenomenon, and was not global, and so we should just move along and stop questioning man-made global warming.

For example, the online Britannica entry on the Medieval Warm Period written by John P. Rafferty writes that it occurred “predominantly in the Northern Hemisphere from Greenland eastward through Europe and parts of Asia.”

Britannica does state that the claim of a global extent is highly controversial, though it really isn’t as we are about to see.

More than 1,200 papers evidence it was global

Indeed the claim that it was global is now backed up by a huge body of scientific studies meticulously compiled by Dr. Sebastian Lüning of Die kalte Sonne and presented at Google Maps here.

unclassified

Over 170 News Outlets Vow To Spread Climate Hysteria Ahead Of UN Summit

by  J. Syemour, Sep. 2, 2019 in ClimateChangeDispatch

Objectivity and truth-telling are no longer the most “sacred” responsibilities of the news media, at least according to the far-left The Nation magazine. It’s now … climate change.

“We see Covering Climate Now as a fulfillment of journalism’s most sacred responsibilities, which are to inform people and foster constructive debate about common challenges and opportunities,” The Nation wrote on Aug. 28.

The Nation, Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) and The Guardian spearheaded The Covering Climate Now project.

On Aug. 28, they announced that 170 news outlets around the world signed on to the agenda-driven effort. They bragged that biased journalism will be delivered to a combined audience of hundreds of millions of people.

The list included a Who’s Who of liberal U.S. media outlets including Bloomberg, CBS News, PBS NewsHour, Newsweek, “eminent specialist publications” Nature, Scientific American, InsideClimate News, and “distinguished digital publications” HuffPost, Vox, The Intercept, and Slate.

Audiences can expect to be bombarded by climate alarmism the week of Sept. 16-23, since all the participating outlets agreed to focus on climate that week — just ahead of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change summit in New York.

Although some aren’t waiting. CBS has already been celebrating the arrival of 16-year-old “climate warrior” Greta Thunberg and promoting her journey by low-emissions yacht while ignoring the fact that people have to fly to NY to retrieve the boat.

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unclassified

Walruses climbing cliffs and falling off them are natural events: 1994 video from Alaska

by Polar Bear Science, Sept. 2, 2019 in WUWT

Posted on September 1, 2019 | Comments Off on Walruses climbing cliffs and falling off them are natural events: 1994 video from Alaska

US Fish and Wildlife officials in 1994 explain walruses falling to their deaths from a cliff at Cape Pierce in the southern Bering Sea (a haulout for adult males during the ice-free season). Explanation? Overcrowding (too many walruses)!

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Hype from the Netflix/Attenborough ‘climate change is gonna destroy the world’ fearmongers earlier this year notwithstanding – or the media this summer trying to stir up climate change fever – the US Fish and Wildlife Service determined in October 2017 that the Pacific walrus is not being harmed by climate change and is not likely to be harmed within the foreseeable future (USFWS 2017). The IUCN Red List (2015) lists the Pacific walrus as ‘data deficient‘.

Large herds onshore are a sign of population health, not climate change, and walruses have come ashore in the Chukchi Sea during the ice-free season in summer and/or fall for more than 100 years (Crockford 2014; Fischbach et al. 2016; Lowrey 1985). Those are the relevant scientific facts.

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climate-debate

Summer Heatwaves? It Was Hotter In 1707!!

by P. Homewood, Sept.2, 2019 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

To read the headlines in the last month or two, you would think we had been having a Mediterranean summer.

The truth is much more mundane however.

The numbers for last month’s CET are now out. August ended up at 17.1C, meaning that there have been 32 Augusts as warm or warmer. Last month was no warmer than 1801, 1842 and 1932.

Summer as a whole ranked 48th hottest, tied with 1935.

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The summer of 1976 still remains top of the list, but second hottest was way back in 1826.

Indeed there have been warmer summers on 28 occasions prior to 1900. Notably, one such summer was 1666, the 18th warmest. That was, of course, the year of the Great Fire of London, which swept through London between the 2nd and 6th of September.

climate-debate

The Great Failure Of The Climate Models

by Tyler Durden, 26 August 2019 in ZeroHedge

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Christy is not looking at surface temperatures, as measured by thermometers at weather stations. Instead, he is looking at temperatures measured from calibrated thermistors carried by weather balloons and data from satellites. Why didn’t he simply look down here, where we all live? Because the records of the surface temperatures have been badly compromised.

Globally averaged thermometers show two periods of warming since 1900: a half-degree from natural causes in the first half of the 20th century, before there was an increase in industrial carbon dioxide that was enough to produce it, and another half-degree in the last quarter of the century.

The latest U.N. science compendium asserts that the latter half-degree is at least half manmade. But the thermometer records showed that the warming stopped from 2000 to 2014. Until they didn’t.

In two of the four global surface series, data were adjusted in two ways that wiped out the “pause” that had been observed.

The first adjustment changed how the temperature of the ocean surface is calculated, by replacing satellite data with drifting buoys and temperatures in ships’ water intake. The size of the ship determines how deep the intake tube is, and steel ships warm up tremendously under sunny, hot conditions. The buoy temperatures, which are measured by precise electronic thermistors, were adjusted upwards to match the questionable ship data. Given that the buoy network became more extensive during the pause, that’s guaranteed to put some artificial warming in the data.

The second big adjustment was over the Arctic Ocean, where there aren’t any weather stations. In this revision, temperatures were estimated from nearby land stations. This runs afoul of basic physics.

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climate-debate

What Greenland Heatwave?

by P. Homewood, September 1, 2019 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

Let’s start with Qaanaaq (Thule), which the Mirror reporter visited during w/e 25th August. She wrote:

 

A heatwave is gripping The Arctic, melting away Greenland’s ice sheet on an unprecedented scale and threatening a global rise in sea levels – an urgent reminder of the climate crisis we are now all facing.

Kids splashing each other in the sea and locals wearing t-shirts were unheard of here in August 10 years ago.

But now, alongside teenage girls wearing skirts to school and increasing mosquitoes, it is a common occurrence for the residents of Qaanaaq, in north-west Greenland, one of the world’s most northerly cities situated 700 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

This is the frontline of climate change…..

The country is also experiencing record-breaking temperatures. In mid-June, along the eastern coast it was 9C warmer than the 1981-2010 average.

Just as western Europe has baked in a heatwave with record temperatures at the end of July, the hot air moved as far north as Greenland with the gauge hitting 22C on August 1. The average high is around 7C….

 

According to Weather Underground, however, daily maximum temperatures at Qaanaaq never got above 47F that week. The highest temperature of the month was 63F on the 1st.

KNMI confirm that the record temperature at Qaanaaq is 67F, and that a temperature of 63F was also recorded way back in 1959.

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climate-debate

Week in review – science edition

by Judith Curry, August 31, 2019 in Climate Etc.

A few things that caught my eye this past week.

Several papers of fundamental importance:

*Important new paper by Peter Minnett:  The response of the ocean thermal skin layer to variations in incident infrared radiation [link]

*A provocative paper with many implications:  Increased atmospheric vapor pressure deficit  [link]

*Does Surface Temperature Respond to or Determine Downwelling Longwave Radiation? [link]

*Reframing the carbon cycle of the subpolar Southern Ocean [link]  Synopsis [link]

Something new and interesting from Russian scientists. A new approach to local climate dynamics, integrating bifurcation analysis, control theory and climate theory. Start with Section 7 for an overview worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.114

Climate change is altering winter precipitation across the Northern Hemisphere [link]

The influence of weather regimes on European renewable energy production and demand. [link]

Hemispheric Asymmetry of Tropical Expansion Under CO2 Forcing [link]

How predictable were this summer’s European temperature records? [link]

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