Archives mensuelles : octobre 2020

climate-debate

Low Solar Activity Points To Colder Than Normal 2020/21 European Winter

by P. Gosselin, Oct 16, 2020 in NoTricksZone

SnowFan here reports on the latest winter forecasts for the 2020/21 Europe winter. History and statistics show Europe could be in for a frosty winter. 

Currently a significant La Nina is shaping up, and history shows that these events in the Pacific have an impact on Europe’s winters:

 

 

The NOAA reanalysis above shows the temperature deviations (left) and for precipitation (right) from the WMO average 1981-2010 during the six La Niña years of winter in Europe. Large parts of Europe have average temperatures and precipitation is distributed differently, with Germany being slightly drier overall than the WMO average. Is a 2020/21 winter in Germany under La Niña conditions shaping up to have average temperatures and slightly less humidity?

Strong winter-solar correlation

A more important factor determining winter in Europe may be solar activity. Data from the German DWD national weather service since 1954 show a remarkable higher frequency of cold winters in times of low solar activity, such as we are now in the midst of.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

The Great Energy Non-Transition

by B. Everett, Oct 15, 2020 in CO2Coalition

One of the troubling characteristics of today’s civic discourse is the tendency to confuse predictions with reality.  Nowhere is this problem more severe than in the debate over climate and its associated issues.

The last hundred years have seen increasing emissions of carbon dioxide – a benign gas.  In reality, this slight increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations (from 0.03% in the nineteenth century to 0.04% today) has brought nothing but beneficial effects, including increased crop yields and greater drought resistance.  Nonetheless, climate alarmists argue that rising temperatures are bringing catastrophic storms, flooding, disease, inundation, extinction and general misery.  Unlike the benefits of CO2 which are clear and measurable, climate catastrophe remains nothing more than a prediction generated by computer models which have never produced meaningful forecasts of climate impacts.

A frequent corollary of climate alarmism is that the world has undertaken a radical transformation of the global energy system away from fossil fuels toward zero-carbon, renewable energy.  A Google search of the term “energy transition” yields over 5 million hits, many accompanied by terms such as “unstoppable” and “irreversible”.  But is this transition actually taking place? Three arguments are generally offered – none of them valid.

First, “energy transition” supporters point to the high growth rates for renewable energy sources with wind increasing at over 20% annually since 2000 and solar at over 40% per year, compared to less than 2% for fossil fuels.  Sounds great, but the absolute numbers tell a different story.  In 2019, despite forty years and trillions of dollars of subsidies, wind energy contributes about 2% of total global energy use and solar just over 1%.  Fossil fuels accounted for 84%, down just two percentage points over the last 20 years.

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climate-debate, renewable energy

Study: Renewable Energy does Nothing to Reduce CO2 Emissions

by E. Worall, Oct 14, 2020 in WUWT

h/t Dr. Willie Soon / James Delingpole / Breitbart; A group of high profile scientists, including Dr. Willie Soon, have published a meticulously referenced study which discuses the pros and cons of various CO2 reduction strategies.

 

The abstract of the study:

Energy and Climate Policy—An Evaluation of Global Climate Change Expenditure 2011–2018 

by Coilín ÓhAiseadha 1,*, Gerré Quinn 2, Ronan Connolly 3,4, Michael Connolly 3 and Willie Soon 4

1 Department of Public Health, Health Service Executive, Dr Steevens’ Hospital, D08 W2A8 Dublin 8, Ireland
2 Centre for Molecular Biosciences, Ulster University, Coleraine BT521SA, Northern Ireland, UK
3 Independent Scientists, Dublin 8, Ireland
4 Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences (CERES), Salem, MA 01970, USA*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

Concern for climate change is one of the drivers of new, transitional energy policies oriented towards economic growth and energy security, along with reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and preservation of biodiversity. Since 2010, the Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) has been publishing annual Global Landscape of Climate Finance reports. According to these reports, US$3660 billion has been spent on global climate change projects over the period 2011–2018. Fifty-five percent of this expenditure has gone to wind and solar energy. According to world energy reports, the contribution of wind and solar to world energy consumption has increased from 0.5% to 3% over this period. Meanwhile, coal, oil, and gas continue to supply 85% of the world’s energy consumption, with hydroelectricity and nuclear providing most of the remainder. With this in mind, we consider the potential engineering challenges and environmental and socioeconomic impacts of the main energy sources (old and new). We find that the literature raises many concerns about the engineering feasibility as well as environmental impacts of wind and solar. However, none of the current or proposed energy sources is a “panacea”. Rather, each technology has pros and cons, and policy-makers should be aware of the cons as well as the pros when making energy policy decisions. We urge policy-makers to identify which priorities are most important to them, and which priorities they are prepared to compromise on.

Read more: https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/18/4839/htm

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climate-debate

WHY IS NORTH AMERICA IMMUNE TO GLOBAL WARMING?

by Cap Allon, Oct 9, 2020 in Electroverse

I’m not trying to be facetious here, but I don’t know what other stance climate alarmists can take. Every data point –even those from warm-mongers NOAA– reveals that the North American continent is cooling.

Taking NOAA’s data as read, with its Urban Heat Island (UHI) bias, it still reveals a sharp cooling trend across the U.S. and Canada from 2015 through 2019. A trend that has continued into 2020 with the majority of regions suffering a late start to summer, and, now, an early beginning to winter.

North America is currently bracing for its sixth or seventh (I’ve genuinely lost count) Arctic blast of the season. By next Monday (Oct 19) an enormous mass of polar cold will have engulfed 90+% of the continent:

 

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See also  ACCORDING TO THE MSM, GLOBAL WARMING COULD STILL MAKE IT TOO COLD TO GROW CITRUS FRUITS IN SOUTHEAST U.S.

unclassified

Claim: The deep sea is slowly warming

by American Geophysical Union, Oct 13, 2020 in WUWT

WASHINGTON–New research reveals temperatures in the deep sea fluctuate more than scientists previously thought and a warming trend is now detectable at the bottom of the ocean.

In a new study in AGU’s journal Geophysical Research Letters, researchers analyzed a decade of hourly temperature recordings from moorings anchored at four depths in the Atlantic Ocean’s Argentine Basin off the coast of Uruguay. The depths represent a range around the average ocean depth of 3,682 meters (12,080 feet), with the shallowest at 1,360 meters (4,460 feet) and the deepest at 4,757 meters (15,600 feet).

They found all sites exhibited a warming trend of 0.02 to 0.04 degrees Celsius per decade between 2009 and 2019 – a significant warming trend in the deep sea where temperature fluctuations are typically measured in thousandths of a degree. According to the study authors, this increase is consistent with warming trends in the shallow ocean associated with anthropogenic climate change, but more research is needed to understand what is driving rising temperatures in the deep ocean.

“In years past, everybody used to assume the deep ocean was quiescent. There was no motion. There were no changes,” said Chris Meinen, an oceanographer at the NOAA Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory and lead author of the new study. “But each time we go look we find that the ocean is more complex than we thought.”The challenge of measuring the deep

Researchers today are monitoring the top 2,000 meters (6,560 feet) of the ocean more closely than ever before, in large part due to an international program called the Global Ocean Observing System. Devices called Argo floats that sink and rise in the upper ocean, bobbing along in ocean currents, provide a rich trove of continuous data on temperature and salinity.

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climate-debate

The “Warmest September Ever” Is A Myth… Cooler Times Likely Ahead As NASA Foresees Strong La Nina…

by P. Gosselin, Oct 9, 2020 in NoTricksZone

Our friend “SnowFan” here looks at the claims that September 2020 was the warmest ever recorded. It turns out that other measurement advanced satellites don’t agree.

According to the much ballyhooed data, temperatures in Europe in September this year were on average 0.2 degrees Celsius higher than in the previous record September 2018. The service providing the data is part of the European earth observation program Copernicus.

But the satellite data from the UAH and RSS both agree that this is not really the case!

 

Above the global satellite data from UAH (left) and from RSS (right) in the tables clearly clearly show the monthly deviations from the WMO mean 1981-2010 (UAH) and from the climate mean 1979-1998 (RSS): September 2020 was not the warmest since satellite measurements began in 1979. At UAH, September 2019 was slightly warmer while at RSS even September 2017 was warmer.

Strong La Nina may be in the works

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better to know...?, climate-debate

LA NINA HAS ARRIVED: NEAR-TERM COOLING

by Cap Allon, Oct 11, 2020 in Electroverse

The following article is written by Bob Hoye of www.pivotaladvice.com.

Last week, the Global Warming policy Forum headlined “La Nina Is Here”. Why the headline? Because the warming El Nino is over and the change to the La Nina represents cooling. Like seasonal and actual climate change, it is a regular event. Which in physics means logical and predictable. And some cooling is showing up in various charts. Well, in those not altered by promoters of AGW.

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minerals and ores, only geology

Geologists solve puzzle that could predict valuable rare earth element deposits

by University of Exter, Oct. 11, 2020 in WUWT

Pioneering new research has helped geologists solve a long-standing puzzle that could help pinpoint new, untapped concentrations of some the most valuable rare earth deposits.

A team of geologists, led by Professor Frances Wall from the Camborne School of Mines, have discovered a new hypothesis to predict where rare earth elements neodymium and dysprosium could be found.

The elements are among the most sought after, because they are an essential part of digital and clean energy manufacturing, including magnets in large wind turbines and electric cars motors.

For the new research, scientists conducted a series of experiments that showed sodium and potassium – rather than chlorine or fluorine as previously thought – were the key ingredients for making these rare earth elements soluble.

This is crucial as it determines whether they crystalise – making them fit for extraction – or stayed dissolved in fluids.

The experiments could therefore allow geologists to make better predictions about where the best concentrations of neodymium and dysprosium are likely to be found.

The results are published in the journal, Science Advances on Friday, October 9th 2020.

University of Exeter researchers, through the ‘SoS RARE’ project, have previously studied many natural examples of the roots of very unusual extinct carbonatite volcanoes, where the world’s best rare earth deposits occur, in order to try and identify potential deposits of the rare earth minerals.

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better to know...?, climate and geology, climate-debate

A Geological Perspective of Polar Bears

by D. Middelton, Oct 11, 2020 in WUWT

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Estimates have ranged from 70,000 to 5,000,000 years ago. The oldest confirmed polar bear fossil dates to 110,000 to 130,000 years ago… Meaning that polar bears survived the Eemian interglacial stage.

The peak warmth of the Eemian interglacial stage marks the boundary between the Late Pleistocene Tarantian Age and the Middle Pleistocene Ionian Age.

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climate-debate

Magically correcting Australia’s thermometers from 1,500 kilometers away

by JoNova, Oct 8, 2020

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology uses “surrounding” thermometers to adjust for odd shifts in data (caused by things like long grass, cracked screens, or new equipment, some of which is not listed in the site information). The Bureau fishes among many possible sites to find those that happen to match up or , err “correlate” during a particular five year period. Sometimes these are not the nearest site, but ones… further away. So the BOM will ignore the nearby stations, and use further ones to adjust the record.

These correlations, like quantum entanglements, are mysterious and fleeting. A station can be used once in the last hundred years to “correct” another, but for all the other years it doesn’t correlate well — which begs the question of why it had these special telediagnostic powers for a short while, but somehow lost them? Or why a thermometer 300km away might show more accurate trends than one 50km away.

One of the most extreme examples was when Cobar in NSW was used to adjust the records at Alice Springs –almost 1500km away (h/t Bill Johnston). That adjustment was 0.6°C down in 1932 (due to a site move, we’re told). This potentially matters to larger trends because Alice Springs is a long running remote station — the BOM itself says that Alice Springs alone contributes about 7-10 % of the national climate signal.[1] Curiously Cobar itself was adjusted in 1923 by a suite of ten stations including Bendigo Prison which is another 560 km farther south in a climate zone pretty close to Melbourne. In 1923 Cobar official temperatures were adjusted down by a significant 1.3 °C. No reason is given for this large shift — a shift larger than the entire (supposed) effect of CO2 in the last hundred years.

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climate-debate

LIST OF HISTORICAL TEMPERATURE EXTREMES BY U.S. STATE SHOWS NO SIGN OF GLOBAL WARMING

by Cap Allon, Oct 10, 2020 in Electroverse

Below I’ve compiled a list of the hottest and coldest temperatures ever recorded in each U.S. state, according to NOAA data. Surely, if catastrophic global warming was actually a thing then it would show up in the temperature records. Spoiler: it doesn’t, and a discussion on why follows the list.

ALABAMA

– All-time highest temperature: 112° F (Centreville on Sept. 6, 1925)

– All-time lowest temperature: -27° F (New Market 2 on Jan. 30, 1966)

ALASKA

– All-time highest temperature: 100° F (Fort Yukon on June 27, 1915)

– All-time lowest temperature: -80° F (Prospect Creek on Jan. 23, 1971)

ARIZONA

– All-time highest temperature: 128° F (Lake Havasu City on June 29, 1994)

– All-time lowest temperature: -40° F (Hawley Lake on Jan. 7, 1971)

ARKANSAS

All-time highest temperature: 120° F (Ozark on Aug.10, 1936)

– All-time lowest temperature: -29° F (Gravette on Feb.13, 1905)

CALIFORNIA

– All-time highest temperature: 134° F (Greenland Ranch on July 10, 1913)

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WISCONSIN

– All-time highest temperature: 114° F (Wisconsin Dells on July 13, 1936)

– All-time lowest temperature: -55° F (Couderay 7 W on Feb. 4, 1996)

WYOMING

– All-time highest temperature: 115° F (Basin on Aug. 8, 1983)

– All-time lowest temperature: -66° F (Riverside Ranger Station, Yellowstone National Park) on Feb. 9, 1933)

More than 210 degrees Fahrenheit separates the highest and the lowest temperatures on record in the United States, and it isn’t a coincidence that the majority of these temperatures records –for both hot and cold– occur during solar minimums.

This is because low solar activity weakens the jet stream, reverting its usual tight ZONAL flow to more of a wavy MERIDIONAL one. This violent “buckling” effect FULLY explains how regions can experience pockets of anomalous heat while others, even relatively nearby, can be dealing with blobs of record cold: basically, in the NH, Arctic cold is dragged anomalously far south and Tropical warmth is pushed unusually far north (for more see the two links below)

energy and fields

Pic de la demande de pétrole : mythe ou réalité ?

by M. Cordiez, 9 Oct 2020 in ConnaissancedesEnergies

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Et si on considérait le problème dans l’autre sens ?

Historiquement, le succès des compagnies pétrolières était jugé à leur capacité à renouveler, voire accroître, leurs réserves par des découvertes. Avec le temps et l’épuisement des ressources aisément accessibles, cet exercice est devenu de plus en plus complexe pour les majors privées (BP, Total, ENI…). L’essentiel des réserves conventionnelles sont aujourd’hui détenues par des compagnies nationales (Saudi Aramco, National Iranian Oil Company, Iraq National Oil Company…). Quant aux pétroles non conventionnels, il s’agit de ressources chères à exploiter, non rentables au cours actuel du baril, et sur lesquelles un positionnement reste de l’ordre du pari. Des sommes colossales ont été perdues par les fonds et entreprises qui ont investi dans le pétrole de roche mère aux États-Unis(6).

Les discours sur l’arrivée opportune d’un pic de la demande ne seraient-ils donc pas également un moyen pour les compagnies pétrolières d’offrir une narration positive face à leur incapacité à renouveler leurs réserves ? La conséquence de cette contrainte est alors présentée comme le fruit d’une stratégie : il n’est plus besoin de renouveler les réserves, vu que la demande va diminuer. Cette approche est en outre favorable en termes de communication car elle renvoie l’image de compagnies responsables vis-à-vis du climat, tout en portant un message optimiste : les émissions de gaz à effet de serre baisseront naturellement sans effort particulier, du fait d’une demande pétrolière qui diminuera d’elle-même.

Hors pandémie de Covid, nous devons garder à l’esprit que la consommation pétrolière – donc la demande – était croissante jusqu’en 2019 inclus. Elle a augmenté de 924 000 barils/jour entre 2018 et 2019, soit une augmentation de 0,9%(7). L’idée d’un pic de la demande est séduisante et rassurante, mais elle reste aujourd’hui une hypothèse prospective. D’ailleurs, plusieurs entreprises pétrolières telles que l’Américaine ConocoPhilips et la Russe Gazprom Neft prévoient une reprise de la croissance de la demande une fois la pandémie maîtrisée(8). Nous ne pouvons pas miser notre avenir sur le pari d’un déclin naturel de la demande de pétrole, qui serait poussé à temps vers la sortie par des solutions plus compétitives et déployables à large échelle.

Face aux incertitudes qui planent sur la pérennité de l’offre(9)(10) et à la nécessité impérieuse de réduire nos émissions de gaz à effet de serre pour atteindre la neutralité carbone, nous devons agir et tout mettre en œuvre pour assurer le déclin de la demande pétrolière. Répondre à cet enjeu nécessite d’aller au-delà de nos seules espérances quant au potentiel des technologies futures. Cela implique de faire évoluer notre rapport à l’énergie et à ses usages.

better to know...?, climate-debate

New book: Climate Change: The Facts 2020

by A. Watts, Oct 8, 2020 in WUWT

The Institute of Public Affairs today announced the release of a significant new book of research Climate Change: The Facts 2020 published by the Institute of Public Affairs and Australian Scholarly Publishing.

On 24 September 2019, the 17-year-old activist Greta Thunberg addressed the United Nations Climate Action Summit saying, “People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction.” A day earlier, however, the climate policy foundation Climate Intelligence (CLINTEL) sent the UN their World Climate Declaration, signed by 800 prominent scientists including Nobel Laureate Professor Ivar Giaever and Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore, stating that there is no climate emergency: “You’re tired of alarmism and failed predictions of climate models that can’t predict the past, let alone the future. You distrust the business leaders, politicians and scientists of the climate industrial complex – you just want The Facts.”

This book contains original research and new theories of climate and will arm you with these facts. Leading scientists are contributors, including former Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Center Dr. Roy Spencer, and lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Third Assessment Report Professor Emeritus of Meteorology Richard Lindzen of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and many more.

Climate Change: The Facts 2020 is the definitive guide to the latest international research and analysis on climate change science and policy.  Twenty experts in their field from across five countries have written original contributions on the key issues of scientific, political, and public debate about climate change.

​Some of the issues addressed in chapters in Climate Change: The Facts 2020 include:

  • the extent and variability of sea level change
  • the historical record of temperature and ice coverage in the Antarctic
  • the impact of climate change on polar bear populations
  • the manipulation of temperature data by the Bureau of Meteorology
  • whether the Australian bushfires 2019-20 were in fact ‘unprecedented’; and

the prevalence of ‘noble cause’ corruption in climate science.

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renewable energy

UK ‘will take 700 years’ to reach low-carbon heating under current plans

by F. Harvey, Oct 8,2020 in TheGuardian

Ministers must come forward with stringent new plans for low-carbon heating, as targets to insulate homes and generate more power from offshore wind are inadequate and sales of gas boilers showed a record rise last year, energy experts warned.

At current rates, it will take 700 years for the UK to move to low-carbon heating, and at least 19,000 homes a week must be upgraded between now and 2050. There was a record rise last year of 1.8% in the number of new gas boilers installed, showing that the UK is going in the wrong direction.

Government plans will see only about 12,500 homes in total installed with low-carbon heat pumps, according to a report from the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC).

“We must move away from this situation where the government is sitting on its hands,” said Robert Gross, director of UKERC and co-author of the report.

No new homes should be built with gas boilers, the experts said. The government’s pledge to build millions of new homes does not specify that they must be built with low-carbon heating.

The prime minister pledged this week that offshore wind would power and heat every home by 2030, with 40GW of turbines. But those plans are geared towards existing levels of electricity usage, UKERC experts pointed out. Demand for electricity is set to double as drivers switch to electric cars and as we cease to heat our homes with fossil fuels. According to one estimate, heating the UK’s homes alone would require 67GW of offshore wind power.

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According to one estimate, heating the UK’s homes alone would require 67GW of offshore wind power.Photograph: Owen Humphreys/PA

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Corona-induced CO2 emission reductions are not yet detectable in the atmosphere

by Karlsruher Institut für Technology, Sep 21, 2020 in EurekAlert

Based on current data measured in the energy, industry, and mobility sectors, restrictions of social life during the corona pandemic can be predicted to lead to a reduction of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions by up to eight percent in 2020. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), cumulative reductions of about this magnitude would be required every year to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement by 2030. Recent measurements by researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) revealed that concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has not yet changed due to the estimated emission reductions. The results are reported in Remote Sensing (DOI: 10.3390/rs12152387).

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See also here =  Can We Measure a COVID-19-Related Slowdown in Atmospheric CO2 Growth? Sensitivity of Total Carbon Column Observations

better to know...?, climate-debate

A HISTORY OF CLIMATE FRAUD (I)

by Cap Allon, oct 5, 2020 in Electroverse

Much of the below analysis is courtesy of Kenneth Richard.

The combined Hadley Centre and Climatic Research Unit (HadCRUT) data set –which is featured in IPCC reports– underwent a revision from version 3 to version 4 in March of 2012, about a year before the next IPCC report was due.

At the time (early 2012), the HadCRUT3 was showing a slight global cooling trend between 1998 and 2012, visible in the graph below which uses HadCRUT3 and HadCRUT4 raw data. In conjunction with changing versions, the slight cooling trend had convenientlychanged to a slight warming trend:

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As recently as 1990, it was widely accepted that the global temperature trend showed a “0.5°C rise between 1880 and 1950”, as reported by NASA (Hansen and Lebedeff, 1987). This rise (as well as the 0.6C rise between 1880 and 1940) can clearly be seen in the NASA GISS graph from 1987:

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better to know...?

Tens Of Thousands Of Automotive Jobs On The Brink, Climate Policy Hammers Once Mighty German Auto Industry

by AR Göhring at EIKE, Oct 3, 2020 in NoTricksZone

Not only at Daimler, Volkswagen and others, but elsewhere the working people have to fear for their jobs after Brussels and Berlin have declared war on Germany’s most important industry. Now the automotive supply chain is also being hard hit.

Berlin, Brussels tighten the screws

The value-adding industry has already been badly shaken by the exaggerated, simply senseless corona measures of the Merkel IV government. Now the Brussels EU government (including former German minister Ursula von der Leyen) are tightening the screws even more as they love to ban internal combustion engines completely. The EU has just tightened the rules for limiting CO2 emissions. Not only the well-known car manufacturers are under pressure, but also their suppliers, hardly known by name, such as Mahle from Stuttgart.

Mass job losses

The globally producing parts manufacturer still has around 12,000 employees in Germany (72,000 globally). In the country, 2,000 workers are expected to lose their jobs, globally 7,600, and this despite a partial switch to e-car parts. It’s not enough, says a works council member, because there is no concept for the domestic combustion engine factories to convert over to electrical parts.

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climate-debate

Michael Mann Appeals to, Then Ignores Scientific Consensus on 60 Minutes

by James Taylor, Oct 5, 2020 in WUWT

Prominent scientist and climate activist Michael Mann appealed to an asserted scientific consensus to chastise President Donald Trump on CBS’s 60 Minutes program last night. Ironically, Mann himself ignored clear scientific consensus in order to promote his own, out-of-the-mainstream climate change theories.

While interviewing Mann, CBS’s Scott Pelley said, “There have always been fires in the West. There have always been hurricanes in the East. How do we know that climate change is involved in this?” Pelley followed up with, “The president says about climate change, ‘Science doesn’t know.’”

Replied Mann, “The president doesn’t know, and he should know better. He should know that the world’s leading scientific organizations, our own U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and national academies of every major industrial nation, every scientific society in the United States that’s weighed in on the matter. This is a scientific consensus. There’s about as much scientific consensus about human-caused climate change as there is about gravity.”

Mann’s description of the conclusions of the “scientific consensus” however, is exactly the opposite of what scientific bodies report.

As documented in Climate at a Glance: Hurricanes, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) expresses “low confidence” in any connection between climate change and changes in hurricane activity.

Similarly, as documented in Climate at a Glance: U.S. Wildfires, U.S. wildfires are much less frequent and severe than they were in the first half of the 20th century – 100 years of global warming ago. Moreover, the IPCC reports a decrease in drought conditions – which is the primary climate factor regarding wildfires – in the global region including the U.S. West. Moreover, the IPCC finds no evidence of an increase in drought globally, either.

Ultimately, data, evidence, and scientific facts are far more indicative of scientific truth than a real or imagined consensus of scientists. Yet, to the extent Michael Mann wishes to invoke consensus as a scientific argument, the clear consensus of scientists is that Mann is promoting extreme climate theories that have no basis in reality.

unclassified

ARGENTINA HOLDS 8C TO 16C BELOW AVERAGE AS 2 FEET OF SNOW BURIES USHUAIA PROVINCE

by Cap Allon, Oct 4, 2020 in Electroverse

The out-of-season cold and snow currently blasting BOTH HEMISPHERES is intensifying: North America, western/northern Europe, central/eastern Asia, and practically ALL of Australia have now been joined by Argentina.

The South American nation of Argentina measures 2,175 miles long and lies between 21°S and 55°S. Despite its impressive latitude spanning length, the country has been completely engulfed by a powerful Antarctic blast.

Looking at the latest GFS run (shown below), Argentina is set to suffer temperature departures as much as 16C below the seasonal average on Sunday, Oct 4:

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Restoring Scientific Debate on Climate

by Jim Steele, Oct 3, 2020 in WUWT

The political genius of Abraham Lincoln’s efforts to unify the country during America’s most divisive time has been attributed to assembling a “team of rivals”. Likewise, scientific research is published so rivals and supporters of a hypothesis can independently and critically examine it. The great benefits of a team of rivals is also the basis for convening red team/blue team debates.

In 2017, Dr Steve Koonin, a physicist who served as Obama’s Undersecretary for Science in the US Department of Energy, urged convening red-team blue-team debates for climate science in his article A ‘Red Team’ Exercise Would Strengthen Climate Science.  “The national-security community pioneered the “Red Team” methodology to test assumptions and analyses, identify risks, and reduce—or at least understand—uncertainties. The process is now considered a best practice in high-consequence situations”.

Unfortunately, the public climate science debate has been framed as “deniers” versus “alarmists”, or “honest saintly scientists” versus “corrupt perpetrators of a hoax”.  The media pushes exaggerated claims of a crisis while some scientists misleadingly shield their hypotheses claiming the “science is settled”.  But science is a process and never settled. However, all sides do agree carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and concentrations have increased. All sides agree the climate is changing. That science is indeed settled. But complex climate dynamics are not driven solely by CO2 and many unsettled questions remain.  Scientists still debate whether climate has a higher or lower sensitivity to rising CO2. Answering that question depends on the unsettled science regards competing contributions from natural variability and landscape changes. And because rising CO2 and warmth benefits photosynthesizing plants, scientists debate the beneficial contributions of rising CO2.

Climate models could not replicate recent warming when only natural climate change was considered. But models could simulate recent warming since 1970s after adding CO2. That was the only evidence that supported the notion that increasing CO2 caused observed warming. However, there’s a flaw in such reasoning. Models limited to just natural climate dynamics failed to explain recent changes simply because our understanding is still incomplete. For example the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a major driver of natural climate change was only recently characterized in 1997, but has been shown to account for 100 years of changing climate along the coasts of the north eastern Pacific.

 

Urban Heat Island profile Image from Lawrence Berkeley Labs

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climate-debate

Ice discharge in the North Pacific set off series of climate events during last ice age

by Oregon State University, Oct 1, 2020 in Science Daily

Repeated catastrophic ice discharges from western North America into the North Pacific contributed to, and perhaps triggered, hemispheric-scale changes in the Earth’s climate during the last ice age, new research published online today in Science reveals.

The discovery provides new insight into the impact rapidly melting ice flowing into the North Pacific may have on the climate across the planet, said Maureen Walczak, a paleoclimatologist in Oregon State University’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and the study’s lead author.

“Understanding how the ocean has interacted with glacial ice in the past helps us predict what could happen next,” Walczak said.

The Cordilleran ice sheet once covered large portions of western North America from Alaska to Washington state and western Montana. Radiocarbon dating and analyses of the marine sediment record revealed that recurrent episodes of discharge from this ice sheet over the past 42,000 years were early events in a chain reaction of disturbances to the global climate. These disturbances triggered changes in deep ocean circulation and retreat of ice sheets in the North Atlantic.

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