A New Year’s Look At WUWT

by  W. Essenbach, Dec 31, 2020 in WUWT


 

Today, as the result of a series of wrong turns and bad choices, I ended up at the Wikipedia entry for Watts Up With That. It says:

Watts Up With That? (WUWT) is a blog promoting climate change denial that was created by Anthony Watts in 2006.  

The blog predominantly discusses climate issues with a focus on anthropogenic climate change, generally accommodating beliefs that are in opposition to the scientific consensus on climate change. 

Appalled by the misrepresentations in that, I thought I might comment on them.

First, the blog doesn’t “promote climate change denial”. I always laugh when I read about “denial” because none of the authors of such nonsense ever get around to telling us exactly what we’re supposed to be “denying”. Me, I deny nothing. I disagree with some of the revealed wisdom of those who believe in “consensus science” but that’s a very different thing. And for those who would like a full explanation of why “consensus” has nothing to do with science, let me recommend a wonderful paper entitled AliensCause Global Warming.

The real misunderstanding, however, is that WUWT doesn’t “promote” anything. Instead, it serves a very different purpose. Let me explain what WUWT really is, which will require a bit of a digression. But then if you know me, you’ll know that I’m susceptible to being sidetractored …

The Middle East Doubles Down on Oil and Gas As the UN Warns of “Climate Emergency”

by T. Doshi, Dec 31, 2020 in WUWT


At the virtual “Climate Ambition Summit” co-hosted by the UN and UK and attended by over 70 world leaders on December 12th, Secretary-General António Guterres issued a stark warning: the world is facing a catastrophe ahead as it is on track to warm by more than 30 C by the end of the century “unless all countries declare climate emergency”. He expressed disappointment at the summit that the G-20 countries are “spending 50% more in their stimulus and rescue packages on sectors linked to fossil fuel production and consumption than on low carbon energy…This is unacceptable”.

The Secretary-General asked earnestly “Can anybody still deny we are facing a dramatic emergency”? The question poses the vast gulf between the policy positions of key Western governments and the oil and gas producers in the Middle East. For the Middle East hydrocarbon producers hit by the ‘double whammy’ of sharply reduced oil and gas price – the mainstay of government revenues — and the impact of Covid-19 lockdowns on domestic economic activity, the strategy for national survival is clear and could not be more opposed to the UN Secretary-General’s: sharply increasing the pace of monetizing the oil and gas reserves that their countries are blessed with.

Middle East To Supply More Oil And Gas

Within two weeks of the UN summit, Saudi Arabia’s energy minister announced on December 27th  the discovery of four new oil and gas fields, including unconventional resources. The discoveries will boost the country’s plans to increase its maximum sustained crude production capacity from the current 12 million b/d to 13 million b/d as well as developing its gas resources to free up more oil for export instead of burning it for power generation.

Egg on Their Faces: 10 Climate Alarmist Predictions for 2020 That Went Horribly Wrong

by T. O’Neil, Dec 28, 2020, in PJMedia


Long before Beto O’Rourke claimed the world only had 10 years left for humans to act against climate change, alarmists had spent decades predicting one doomsday scenario after another, each of which stubbornly failed to materialize. It seems climate armageddon has taken a permanent sabbatical.

Many of those doomsday predictions specifically mentioned the annus horribilus of 2020. Those predictions also failed, some rather spectacularly.

Steve Milloy, a former Trump/Pence EPA transition team member and founder of JunkScience.com, compiled ten climate predictions for 2020 that fell far off the mark.

1. Average global temperature up 3 degrees Celsius

10. Glaciers gone at Glacier National Park

In March 2009, U.S. Geological Survey ecologist Daniel Fagre predicted that the glaciers in Montana’s Glacier National Park would disappear by 2020.

New Climate Models (CMIP6) Offer No Improvement, Model Discrepancies As Large As The Last Version (CMIP5)

by K. Richard, Dec 24, 2020 in NoTricksZone


The “unsatisfactorily large” magnitude of the discrepancies between models in estimating the various radiative contributions to Earth’s energy imbalance serves to undermine confidence that CO2’s small impact could even be detected amid all the uncertainty.

Scientists have engaged in offering their educated guesses, or estimates, of cloud radiative effects for decades.

In the latest models, CMIP6, the top of atmosphere (TOA) net cloud radiative effects (CRE) when considering clouds’ longwave and shortwave combined impact is somewhere between -17 W/m² and -31 W/m² (Wild, 2020). That’s a 14 W/m²spread in CRE modeling.

The discrepancy range between modeled estimates for downward longwave clear-sky radiation is 22.5 W/m². This is the component where CO2’s underwhelming 0.2 W/m² per decade impact (Feldman et al., 2015) is manifested. Modeling discrepancies are thus more than 100 times larger than CO2’s forcing contribution over a 10-year period.

ELEVEN YEARS AGO TODAY AL GORE PREDICTED THE NORTH POLE WOULD BE COMPLETELY ICE FREE IN FIVE YEARSp

by Cap Allon, Dec 13, 2020 in Electroverse


On December 13 & 14, 2009, professor, prophet, and soothsayer Al Gore predicted the North Polar Ice Cap could be completely ice free within the next five to seven years.

 

Gore made his prediction at COP15 Copenhagen which ran from Dec 7 – Dec 18, 2009, where he repeatedly referenced “state-of-the-art” computer modeling to suggest that the north polar ice cap may lose all of its ice by 2014.

“Some of the models suggest that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during some of the summer months, could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years,” Gore claimed.

“Join me in asking president Obama and the US Senate to set a deadline of 22 April for final action in the US Senate,” he said. “I do not believe we can wait till next November or December.”

The Guardian wrote on Dec 16, 2009 in an article entitled “Al Gore rallies the troops in Copenhagen“:

[Gore] kept up the pace by calling for the international community to sign up to a fully fledged climate change treaty by July 2010 – and then announcing that Mexico was prepared to host a deal-making summit.

He scolded rich countries for demanding the developing world offer evidence of emissions cuts while at the same time trying to inflate the funds they were prepared to offer poor countries to deal with climate change. And he was just as tough on activists who have embraced him as a hero, demanding they set aside their pride and their principles and embrace a deal – no matter how imperfect. He said he recognized their frustration with the glacial pace of negotiations. He agreed that cap-and-trade schemes to cut carbon emissions were an imperfect solution – Gore confessed to favoring a carbon tax – but the current efforts for a deal were the best prospect of avoiding catastrophic climate change.

And there was no trace of sympathy for opponents of action on climate change. Gore began with a brief run-through of the latest science on melting of the Arctic ice cap, evidence he said “only reckless fools would ignore.”

2020 Review: Observational And Modeling Studies Show Temperature Falls As CO2 Rises

by K. Richard, Dec 28, 2020 in NoTricksZone


A 2020 observational study (Zhang et al., 2020) determined “temperatures of atmospheric air with substantially higher CO2 concentration (ranging from 3200 ppm to 16,900 ppm) were lower than that with the lower CO2 concentration (480 ppm)” and a 2020 modeling study (Drotos et al., 2020) assessed that when CO2 goes beyond 4 times preindustrial – 1,120 ppm – “climate sensitivity decreases to nearly zero” because the climate cyclically cools by 10 K.

So the science is settled, right?

 

….

Greenland Fall Temperatures Unchanged. Proxy Data Show No Warming At 8 Of 9 Antarctic Peninsula Sites Since 1830!

by Kyrie, Dec 29, 2020 in NoTricksZone


Before looking at Antarctica Peninsula, we first take a look at Greenland, which also is considered by the global warming alarmists to be part of the most threatening tipping points. If the ice on Greenland ever melted, like they warn it will, sea levels globally would rise some 6 meters. (Never mind this scenario would take many centuries).

Today we look at the November and autumn trends in Greenland. First we look at November mean temperatures for which the Japan meteorological Agency (JMA) has sufficient data to compute a trend going back to 1999.

 

Four of the 6 stations examined show cooling or no warming trend.

But that’s only for one month, and so doesn’t really tell us a whole lot. So next we look at autumn mean temperatures for these six stations. If autumn is warming then we no that is not ideal for the overall ice formation season.

China And Iran Start Drilling In This Super Giant Gas Field

by P. Homewood, Dec 27, 2020 in NotalotofPeopleKnowThat


Drilling operations of the first well of the game-changing but highly-controversial Phase 11 of Iran’s supergiant South Pars non-associated natural gas field officially began last week. Significant gas recovery from the enormous resource will commence in the second half of the next Iranian calendar year that begins on 21 March 2021. The long-stalled Phase 11 development supposedly saw the withdrawal of all Chinese involvement in October 2019. In reality, though, China is still intimately involved in its development and is looking to further scale up its activities following the inauguration of Joe Biden as U.S. President on 20 January.

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Natural-Gas/China-And-Iran-Start-Drilling-In-This-Super-Giant-Gas-Field.html

The new field is expected to eventually produce 57 million cubic metres per day (mcm/d), about a tenth of Iran’s current output.

The article goes on to describe how China got around US sanctions on Iran, after taking over Total’s 50.1% stake in the project in 2018:

Newly Discovered Greenland Plume Drives Thermal Activities in the Arctic

by C. Rotter, Dec 29, 2020  in WUWT


A team of researchers understands more about the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. They discovered a flow of hot rocks, known as a mantle plume, rising from the core-mantle boundary beneath central Greenland that melts the ice from below.

The results of their two-part study were published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

“Knowledge about the Greenland plume will bolster our understanding of volcanic activities in these regions and the problematic issue of global sea-level rising caused by the melting of the Greenland ice sheet,” said Dr. Genti Toyokuni, co-author of the studies.

The North Atlantic region is awash with geothermal activity. Iceland and Jan Mayen contain active volcanoes with their own distinct mantle plumes, whilst Svalbard – a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean – is a geothermal area. However, the origin of these activities and their interconnectedness has largely been unexplored.

The research team discovered that the Greenland plume rose from the core-mantle boundary to the mantle transition zone beneath Greenland. The plume also has two branches in the lower mantle that feed into other plumes in the region

 

Alarmism Dies In The Maldives: 97% Of 186 Island Coasts Have Grown (59%) Or Not Changed (38%) Since 2005

by C. Rotter, Dec 22, 2020 in WUWT


Reposted from NoTricksZone

By Kenneth Richard on 21. December 2020

Despite sea level rise, a 2019 global analysis (Duvat, 2019) found 89% of 709 island coasts have been either stable or growing in size in recent decades. A new Maldives-only study (Duvat, 2020) finds rapid (>3 to >50%) coastal growth in 110 of 186 Maldives islands from 2005 to 2016. Just 5 islands – 2.7% – actually contracted in size during this period.

Last year Dr. Virginie Duvat published a global assessment of how the Earth’s islands and atolls are faring against the ongoing challenge of sea level rise since satellite monitoring began in the 1980s.

Fortunately she found “no widespread sign of physical destabilization in the face of sea-level rise.” In fact, a) none of the 30 atolls analyzed lost land area, b) 88.6% of the 709 islands studied were either stable or increased in area, c) no island larger than 10 hectare (ha) decreased in size, and d) only 4 of 334 islands (1.2%) larger than 5 ha had decreased in size.

Volcanic eruptions directly triggered ocean acidification during Early Cretaceous

by Northwestern University, Dec 21, 2020 in ScienceDaily


Around 120 million years ago, the earth experienced an extreme environmental disruption that choked oxygen from its oceans.

Known as oceanic anoxic event (OAE) 1a, the oxygen-deprived water led to a minor — but significant — mass extinction that affected the entire globe. During this age in the Early Cretaceous Period, an entire family of sea-dwelling nannoplankton virtually disappeared.

By measuring calcium and strontium isotope abundances in nannoplankton fossils, Northwestern earth scientists have concluded the eruption of the Ontong Java Plateau large igneous province (LIP) directly triggered OAE1a. Roughly the size of Alaska, the Ontong Java LIP erupted for seven million years, making it one of the largest known LIP events ever. During this time, it spewed tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere, pushing Earth into a greenhouse period that acidified seawater and suffocated the oceans.

The World’s Greatest Climate Hypocrite

by GWPF, 2019


Competition is fierce for this year’s Climate Hypocrite of the Year Awards; no more so than in the Luvvie Section. Past winner Leonardo DiCaprio is, as ever, one of the frontrunners. When he’s not lecturing us on climate change, our Leo (`Climate change is real, it is happening right now. It is the most urgent threat facing our entire species’) is cruising on his private yacht or flying between his four luxury homes in New York and California.

Even by Hollywood luvvie standards, DiCap-
rio’s appetite for private jet travel is legendary.
Yet despite his ostentatious lifestyle, he has, for some strange reason, been a board member
of WWF and the National Resources Defense Council, and a UN representative on climate change

NYT: “What happened to Global Warming?”

by E. Worrall, Dec 17, 2020 in WUWT


NYT rolling out the tired global warming makes winter storms more extreme narrative.

How climate change is affecting winter storms.


By John Schwartz

The major winter storm that hit the Eastern United States on Wednesday and Thursday probably prompted some people to ask, “What happened to global warming?”

But although it’s becoming increasingly clear that climate change does have an effect on storms, the relationship can be complex and, yes, counterintuitive. “There were these expectations that winter was basically going to disappear on us,” said Judah Cohen, director of seasonal forecasting at AER, a company that provides information to clients about weather and climate-related risk.

Although winters are becoming warmer and somewhat milder over all, extreme weather events have also been on the increase, and especially in the Northeastern United States, as Dr. Cohen pointed out in a recent paper in the journal Nature Climate Change. From the winter of 2008-9 until 2017-18, there were 27 major Northeast winter storms, three to four times the totals for each of the previous five decades.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/17/climate/climate-change-winter.html

If global warming to date has caused a three to four fold increase in severe winter storms, imagine the bitterly cold weather the next few decades of global warming will bring.

We must act now, before global warming causes us all to freeze to death!

Eastern Alps may have been ice-free in the time of Ötzi the Iceman

by C. Rotter, Dec 21, 2020 in WUWT


From The New Scientist

Glaciers in the Ötztal Alps in Austria are currently melting and may be lost within two decades, but this might not be the first time humans have seen this kind of change. A new analysis reveals that glaciers in this region formed just before or perhaps even within the lifetime of Ötzi the Iceman, a mummified body found just 12 kilometres away in 1991.

Pascal Bohleber at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna and his colleagues drilled 11 metres into the Weißseespitze summit glacier, down to the bedrock, at 3500 metres altitude and collected two ice cores. They then used radiocarbon dating to  analyse microscopic bits of organic material extracted from the ice cores and found that the glacier is 5200 to 6600 years old. Ötzi is thought to have lived between 5100 and 5300 years ago, and his body was found preserved in ice.

The glacier’s age means it formed during a time called the mid-Holocene warm period, when Earth’s climate was warmer than it is now. It is also dome-shaped, which Bohleber says is rare in the Alps and means that the ice has seen very little movement over time, meaning we can use it to study the climate when it formed.

Read more: Ötzi the Iceman’s last journey revealed by moss found in his stomach

“More information on the mid-Holocene warm period, when the glaciers were smaller than today, is direly needed so that we can better predict how the glaciers will respond to the anticipated future climate over the next 50 years,” says Bethan Davies at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Comparing ice cores from different sites tells us quite a bit about the past climate in that region, says Bohleber, but that gets harder as the glaciers thaw. Meltwater makes it more difficult to drill for ice cores and causes the glaciers to slide downhill, exposing the ancient ice to modern contaminants.

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2263399-eastern-alps-may-have-been-ice-free-in-the-time-of-otzi-the-iceman/#ixzz6hDkuLfkW

See also  in GWPF

Polar bears again attracted to Russian town by dead walrus Attenborough blames on no sea ice

by Polar Bear Science, Dec 20, 2020


In the news again: Cape Schmidt (on the Chukchi Sea) made famous by Sir David Attenborough’s false claim that walrus fell to their deaths because of lack of sea ice due to climate change when a clever polar bear hunting strategy was actually to blame.

Last year in December (above), some bears were feeding at Ryrkaypiy’s garbage dump and wandering around town after being displaced from feeding on walrus carcasses by bigger, stronger bears on the nearby point.

This year, the town has managed to keep the bears out of town, so while the residents are having no real problems, more than 30 bears have been spotted near town, almost certainly feeding on natural-death carcasses of walrus along the shore (see photo below from 2017 where Ryrkaypiy can be seen in the background).

 

Wrong Again: 2020’s Failed Climate Doomsaying

by C. Rotter, Dec 18, 2020 in WUWT


Reposted from JunkScience.com

2020 has been the wildest and most unpredictable year in the memory of most people. But did the climate doom that was predicted to occur in or by 2020 materialize? What follows are 10 predictions made for 2020 and what really happened. As it turns out, climate doomsayers weren’t seeing so 20-20 when it came to 2020.

….

Microplastic pollution in Antarctic waters mirrors rates in North Atlantic and Mediterranean

by E. Quinn, Oct 26, 2020 in EyeOn Arctic


Microplastics have been identified in Antarctic waters at rates that mirror the amounts found in oceans elsewhere in the world, including the North Atlantic, says a new study.

“Although no difference in microplastic abundance was found among regions, the values were much higher in comparison to less remote ecosystems, suggesting that the Antarctic and Southern Ocean deep-sea accumulates higher numbers of microplastic pollution than previously expected,” said the authors in the abstract of the paper “High Abundances of Microplastic Pollution in Deep-Sea Sediments: Evidence from Antarctica and the Southern Ocean,” published Friday in the the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

Waters in three areas around Antarctica were sampled for the study: the Antarctic Peninsula, South Sandwich Islands, and South Georgia.

Levels “surprising”

Microplastic is the term used to describe plastics less than, or equal to 5mm.

The study found that just over one particle of microplastic was found in each gram of sediment in each of the three areas.  This rate of microplastics mirrors the amounts found in other oceans that are considerably closer to human settlements.

“Our research highlights that no matter how remote an ecosystem is, it will still show the artefacts of human influence,” said Mánus Cunningham, a researcher from Queen’s University in Belfast, in a news release.

“We have been dumping plastic into our oceans for roughly 70 years now, so in hindsight this may not be terribly surprising. What is surprising is that the levels of this type of pollution are comparable to what we consider moderately or highly polluted regions of the world’s oceans.”

Another warm El Nino year

by GWPF, Dec 3, 2020


2020 is gearing up to be another warm year, strongly affected by natural and regional weather events

It’s that time of the year again when some meteorological organisations predict what the average global temperature might be for the full, current year. Not that we have all the data for 2020, obviously, for most global temperature datasets haven’t even processed November’s data yet. Making a prediction with only just over 80% of the data available is a risky procedure and most sensible scientists would be very circumspect about doing so. But these premature annual announcements are done for political purposes and, in a typical year, always as a precursor to a UN climate conference.

2020 has been a warm year, one of the warmest – and warm years make many people throw caution to the wind, making claims based on select facts they like, ignoring the ones they don’t like.

Let’s go back a few years to the early part of this decade when global temperature had been stagnating for more than ten years and not increasing significantly, as many had predicted. But then came 2014-15 when they started rising again, peaking in 2016. Many voices proclaimed that this was evidence that global temperatures were now accelerating ‘out of control’, something their models had been predicting all along. The climate was making up for all the unchanging years of the so-called global warming hiatus, it was claimed.

Never mind that the sudden rise between 2015 and 2016 was occurring much faster than could be due to greenhouse forcing alone.

2010 – 2020: HadCrut4 global surface temperature change (green); Oceanic Niño Index (ONI) (red/blues)

However, it was not a coincidence that 2016 experienced a record El Nino. For some commentators, however, an El Nino is a finite event. According to its definition – a specific temperature increase in a certain region of the Pacific – an El Nino is either on or off. Hence, they said that subsequent warm years after 2016 were warm due to greenhouse forcing, not El Nino. They argued that average global temperature since then was not influenced by any El Nino warming.

But that’s clearly not the case. The build-up in temperatures before recent El Ninos is obviously not independent of its peak and neither is the decline afterwards, else why did that increase not continue after the El Nino’s ‘interruption.’ So, a year can still be showing the warming influence of previous El Nino conditions whilst not having an El Nino event, something many journalists and even the General Secretary of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), Prof Taalas, prefer to ignore.

 

Today’s Iceland Colder, Icier Than In Last 8,000 Years (Except the 1800s)

by K. Richard, Dec 15, 2020 in ClimateChange Dispatch


A wealth of new research in glacier and sea ice extent shows modern Iceland is 2-4°C colder than all of the last 8,000 years except for a slightly colder late 19th century.

Even the 1700s were warmer with less ice than today in and around Iceland.

A new study (Geirsdóttir et al., 2020) now affirms peak Holocene warmth at least “∼3–4 °C above modern in Iceland” prevailed throughout much of the last 8,000 years.

Data from tree growth, glacier-induced soil erosion, algae productivity, sea ice biomarker proxies (IP25), and other climate indices affirm these conclusions.

Harning et al., 2020 report an overall 7°C Holocene cooling trend In Iceland’s surrounding sea surface temperatures (SST).

“In terms of foraminifera-reconstructed SST, there is an overall trend of cooling throughout the last 8 ka from ~10 °C to ~3 °C.”

 

It is only in the last few centuries of the modern era that temperatures sharply plummeted to their lowest values of the last 10,000 years (Geirsdóttir et al., 2020).

“The coolest climate of the last 10 ka occurred in the late 1800s CE.”

Consequent to the peak cooling, glaciers and sea ice reached their maximum extents of the Holocene just 150 years ago.

While Iceland’s glaciers and North Shelf sea ice extent did partially recover in the first half of the 20th century, the ice extents are still beyond what they were in the 1700s and earlier.

There is nothing to indicate modern warmth or ice recession in and around Iceland is unprecedented or even unusual.

Read more at No Tricks Zone

HadCRUT5 Adjusts Temperatures Upwards Again

by P. Homewood, Dec 16, 2020 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat


The Morice paper claims the extra warming has come from an improved representation of Arctic warming and a better understanding of evolving biases in sea‐surface temperature measurements from ships.

In fact it is not scientific to average together Arctic temperatures with the rest of the planet, as it is comparing apples with oranges. It all has to do with latent heat and water vapour, as Tony Heller brilliantly explained:

Energy Masterminds Announce Latest Folly: Shutdown Of Modern Coal Power Plant Commissioned Just 5 Yrs Ago!

by P. Gosselin, Dec 11, 2020 in NoTricksZone


Pressured by climate activism, power genherator Vattenfall announced it will shut down its recently commissioned 1.65 GW modern Moorburg coal power plant in Hamburg, Germany. It will take the equivalent of over 1600 wind turbines to take up the slack. 

Just days ago, I reported here how Big Wind and crony politicians are pushing to clear 2000 hectares of 1000-year old forests to make way for 60 giant 5-MW wind turbines. Now imagine this being done 25 times because one ultra-modern coal plant will be decommissioned after being in service just 5 years.

One folly leads to another. The race in Germany to build up wind parks everywhere possible (environment be damned) stems from the political folly of shutting down baseload-providing modern coal power plants. Swedish power giant Vattenfall just announced )hat it will be decommissioning its new 1.65 GW combined heat and power (CHP) coal Hamburg-Moorburg power plant.

Britain’s Wild Weather–1940 Style

by P. Homewood, Dec 12, 2020 in NotaLotoPeopleKnowThat


The Winter of 1939/40

https://visitmarple.co.uk/photos/displayimage.php?album=123&pid=6858

 

According to the BBC/Met Office, Britain’s weather has been wild this year, and it is getting wilder. And their evidence?

A wet February, dry May and a couple of hot days in August. Statistically of course, you are likely to get one of two of these sort of events every year, with records going back 150 years or so.

So let’s go back and compare 2020 with some earlier years on record. Far from cherry picking years, I am only going to look at years ending in a zero, starting with 1940. The years 1950 and 1960 will follow later.

The year started with what was the coldest January on record at the time, a record which has only been beaten since by the infamous winter of 1962/63.

Sea surface skin temperature

by A. May, Dec 9, 2020 in WUWT


In previous posts, see here and here, I’ve tried to show that because the oceans cover 71% of Earth and they contain 99% of the thermal energy stored on the Earth’s surface, they dominate the speed and magnitude of climate changes. In all my posts the Earth’s surface is defined as everything from the ocean floor to the top of the atmosphere. The details of the calculation of ocean and atmospheric heat content is detailed in this spreadsheet. The ocean’s huge heat capacity prevents large temperature swings and dampens and delays those that do occur.

Attempting to show the direction, speed, and magnitude of climate change by measuring and averaging atmospheric surface temperatures is pointless, in my opinion. The record we have of atmospheric and ocean surface temperatures is too short and far too inaccurate to provide us with useful trends on a climatic (30 years +) time scale. Further, these records are sporadic measurements in a chaotic surface zone that has large temperature swings. In Montana, United States, for example, recent minimum/maximum temperatures have been as low as -70°F (-57°C) and as high as 117°F (47°C). These enormous swings make measuring year-to-year global average differences of 0.1°C exceedingly difficult. Yet, this is the precision demanded if we are to properly characterize a climate that is only warming at a rate of roughly 1.4°C/century, which is 0.014°C per year and 0.14°C/decade.

New sunspot cycle could be one of the strongest on record, new research predicts

by National Center for Atmospheric Research/University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, Dec 7, 2020 in ScienceDaily


In direct contradiction to the official forecast, a team of scientists led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is predicting that the Sunspot Cycle that started this fall could be one of the strongest since record-keeping began.

In a new article published in Solar Physics, the research team predicts that Sunspot Cycle 25 will peak with a maximum sunspot number somewhere between approximately 210 and 260, which would put the new cycle in the company of the top few ever observed.

The cycle that just ended, Sunspot Cycle 24, peaked with a sunspot number of 116, and the consensus forecast from a panel of experts convened by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is predicting that Sunspot Cycle 25 will be similarly weak. The panel predicts a peak sunspot number of 115.