Archives mensuelles : janvier 2021

better to know...?

Record Low Temperature In Spain Today

by P. Homewood, Jan 6, 2021 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

The storm ‘Filomena’ leaves the lowest temperature ever recorded in the Iberian Peninsula: –34.1C

Temperatures in Spain this winter are reaching maximum levels. This week has been very cold, with frosts in much of Spain even in areas very close to the coast. The early morning of this Wednesday was marked by intense cold and snowfall. The thermometers show such low figures that the temperature at the Clot de la Llança (Alto Aneu) weather station stands out: – 34.1 degrees.

It is the lowest temperature in the Iberian Peninsula since there are records. Information provided by the Parc Natural de l’Alt Pirineu (managed by Meteo Pirineo and Meteo Valls d’Àneu). And it has also been confirmed by AEMET. This temperature, 34.1 degrees below zero, is a record since the last time something similar was recorded was on February 2, 1956 with -32.0ºC in Estany-Gento, in the province of Lleida,

https://www.20minutos.es/noticia/4533488/0/borrasca-filomena-record-temperatura-minima-34-1-grados/

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See also here

climate-debate

Very Inconvenient Alps Glacier History…Top Glaciologists: Alps Were Ice-Free 6000 Years Ago

by C. Rotter, Jan 7, 2021 in WUWT

Alps ice-free…6000 years ago, when CO2 was much lower than today’s levels.

Dr. Sebastian Lüning earlier today released his latest Klimaschau report, No. 6. In the first part he looks at glaciers in the Alps over the course of much the Holocene.

See the video

It turns out that Most of the Alps were ice-free 6000 years ago, glaciologists have discovered.

In his video, the German geologist presents a new paper authored by glaciologists Bohleber et al, 2020 of the Austrian Academy of Science. The Austrian-Swiss team discovered from ice cores that the 3500-meter high Weißseespitze summit was ice free 5900 years ago.

Much warmer in the early Holocene

Lüning next shows why the Alps were ice-free 6000 years ago by using a chart by Heiri et al 2015, which shows it was some 2°C warmer than today.

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climate-debate

More food for Polar Bears: Arctic report card 2020 highlights the huge benefit of less summer sea ice

by Polar Bear Science, Jan 8, 2021 in WUWT

As well as summarizing sea ice changes, NOAA’s 2020 Arctic Report Card features two reports that document the biggest advantage of much less summer sea ice than there was before 2003: increased primary productivity. Being at the top of the Arctic food chain, polar bears have been beneficiaries of this phenomenon because the Arctic marine mammals they depend on for food – seals, walrus and bowhead whales – have been thriving despite less ice in summer.

In the sea ice chapter (Perovich et al. 2020), my favourite of all the figures published is the graph of September vs. March sea ice (above). As you can see, March ice extent has been virtually flat (no declining trend) since 2004. And as the graph below shows, September extent has been without a trend since 2007, as NSIDC ice expert Walt Meier demonstrated last year (see below): it doesn’t take much imagination to see that the value for 2020 from the graph above (the second-lowest after 2012) hasn’t changed the flat-trend line.

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climate-debate

CITY OF BEIJING JUST RECORDED ITS COLDEST TEMPERATURE SINCE 1966

by Cap Allon, Jan 7, 2021 in Electroverse

The mercury in China’s capital Beijing plunged to -19.6C (-3.3F) on Thursday morning, January 7 as the powerful Arctic air mass currently gripping the majority of Asia intensified further.

The reading marked the capital’s coldest temperature since 1966 (solar minimum of cycle 19), in record-books dating back to 1912.

Furthermore, 10 out the 20 national-level meteorological stations in Beijing registered their lowest-ever early-January temperatures Thursday morning.

Blue alerts remain in effect across much of China as record low temperature and heavy snow are forecast to linger, at least until the weekend.

 

The intense cold wave began in mid-December, and is the result of Arctic air spilling down over the Asian continent (see low solar activity and meridional jet stream). Many all-time cold records have fallen across China of late…

See also : LNG Prices hit Record Highs as Severe Cold Intensifies across Asia and Europe

better to know...?

Just How Accurate Are Weather And Climate Measurements?

by Dr J. Lehr & T. Ciccone, Jan 5, 2021 in ClimateChangeDispatch

The accuracy and integrity of weather and climate measurements have always been a concern. However, errors and omissions were not as consequential in the past as they are now.

A hundred or even fifty years ago, our major weather concerns were more limited to local weather. When we have a flight from NYC to LAX, we need to know more detailed and reliable weather information, like is it snowing in St. Louis where we have a layover?

Or the farmer in Nebraska who needs to see the spring wheat production forecast in Ukraine. He needs the best possible information to better estimate the number of acres of winter wheat he should plant for today’s global markets.

We especially need better and more reliable information to decide what actions we should consider preparing for climate changes.

While scientists, engineers, and software programmers know the importance and the need for this data accuracy, the general public is not aware of how challenging these tasks can be.

When looking at long term climate data, we may have to use multiple proxies (indirect measures that we hope vary directly with weather), which add an extra layer of complexities, costs, and sources of error.

One of the most commonly used proxies is the ancient temperature and CO2 levels from ice core samples. Also, for the last few hundred years, tree-ring data was a primary source of annual temperatures.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Climate Change Causation: Was The Medieval Warm Period ‘Regional?’

by F. Menton, Jan 5, 2021 in ClimateChangeDispatch

Some commenters yesterday noted that the climate establishment has not just completely ignored the threat to their orthodoxy posed by the Medieval Warm Period and other similarly-warm pre-human-emissions eras.

Initially, there was a recognition that this issue could be important, and there was definitely some attempt to deal with it.

However, over time, the accumulation of evidence, particularly as to the existence Medieval Warm Period as a global phenomenon, gradually became overwhelming.

So — in the face of evidence that, under the normal precepts of the scientific method, would be deemed to invalidate the hypothesis that only human CO2 emissions could be causing current warming — how can the orthodoxy be kept alive?

The answer, almost entirely, has been to resort to the hand-waving of “detection and attribution” studies, and hope nobody notices. And, to a remarkable extent, nobody notices.

Readers may be interested in a short history of this issue.

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See also  A prequel to the Dantean Anomaly: the precipitation seesaw and droughts of 1302 to 1307 in Europe

better to know...?, minerals and ores, pollution-contamination

The Dark Side of Clean Energy and Digital Technologies by Guillaume Pitron, review — our dirty future

by P. Homewood, Jan 6, 2021 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

When Donald Trump offered to buy Greenland from Denmark in 2019 it was dismissed as illegal and absurd. However, the president’s expression of interest was far from absurd, says Guillaume Pitron. Under its soil Greenland boasts one of the largest concentrations of the rare metals that the world will need to power electric cars, computers, mobile phones, robots, solar power plants, artificial intelligence and many high-tech “green” innovations that have not been dreamt up yet. If Trump were after those minerals, buying Greenland would have been a smart move.

The global production and sales of rare metals are dominated by China. It mines so much of them on home soil and controls so much of their extraction in Africa and elsewhere that it oversees up to 95 per cent of the global production of certain minerals. This puts Beijing in charge of “the oil of the 21st century”, writes Pitron, which is a problem for western nations because it means China can restrict supply and drive prices up or down at will, as Opec does with oil. We have “entrusted a precious monopoly of mineral sovereignty to potential rivals”, he notes.

Discarded devices waiting to have their precious metals extracted

CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/GETTY IMAGES

Rare earth minerals production is very energy intensive. Extracting a single kilogram of some requires mining as much as 1,200 tonnes of rock. “Clean energy is a dirty affair,” Pitron writes. He drives home his point by touring villages near polluted lakes in China that are known locally as “cancer villages”.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

La fin du réchauffement… Pas du changement climatique!

by B. Van Vliet-Lanoë, Jan 1, 2021 in ScienceClimatEnergie

Un hiver froid s’annonce : le premier d’une série qui devrait durer au moins jusqu’en 2053 (Youssef et al., 2009 ; Zharkova et al.  2015 ; Van Vliet, 2019), période où les médias nous assènent une disparition de la banquise estivale, des ours polaires et des phoques ! Ceci est favorisé par l’activité solaire réduite depuis et le minimum solaire actuel (Fig.1). Le cycle solaire suivant (n°25) devrait aussi être faible. Nous y sommes entrés sans un Minimum d’activité aussi profond que celui Dalton (1790-1830) qui a présidé à la « Bérézina ».

 

Fig. 1: Intensité des cycles solaires depuis 1975 et la prédiction du cycle 25 (calculés avec le nombre de taches solaires  2018 * ANRPFD ).  B) évolution de l’extension en km2 des banquises arctique et antarctique depuis 1978 par rapport à la déviation standard 1981-2010 (NSDIC).

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10 Failed Predictions: Video

by C. Rotter, Jan 2, 2021 in WUWT

From Climate Resistance

Many climate alarmist’s failed predictions were centered around 2020. This video examines just ten, and argues that they were produced not by science, but by ideology. This is proved by the fact that rather than suffering any consequences to their careers or public standing, fearmongering individuals and institutions enjoy continued and undeserved success. The analysis of the ten predictions was produced by Steve Milloy and can be read at his website:

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Number Of Global Wild Fires Trending Down Since 2003. Northern Ocean Heat Content Drops Since 2010

In his latest video the veteran geologist looks at wild fires worldwide and the CO2 they emit. He reports that both have been decreasing.

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Citing the results of the European Copernicus satellite atmosphere monitoring service (CAMS), total wildfires globally have fallen steadily, along with their corresponding CO2 emissions:

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climate-debate

UAH Global Temperature Update for December 2020: +0.27 deg. C

by R. Spencer, Jan 2, 2020 in WUWT

The Version 6.0 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for December, 2020 was +0.27 deg. C, down substantially from the November, 2020 value of +0.53 deg. C.For comparison, the CDAS global surface temperature anomaly for the last 30 days at Weatherbell.com was +0.31 deg. C.

2020 ended as the 2nd warmest year in the 42-year satellite tropospheric temperature record at +0.49 deg. C, behind the 2016 value of +0.53 deg. C.

Cooling in December was largest over land, with 1-month drop of 0.60 deg. C, which is the 6th largest drop out of 504 months. This is likely the result of the La Nina now in progress.

The linear warming trend since January, 1979 remains at +0.14 C/decade (+0.12 C/decade over the global-averaged oceans, and +0.18 C/decade over global-averaged land).

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The full UAH Global Temperature Report, along with the LT global gridpoint anomaly image for December, 2020 should be available within the next few days here.

The global and regional monthly anomalies for the various atmospheric layers we monitor should be available in the next few days at the following locations:

Lower Troposphere: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tlt/uahncdc_lt_6.0.txt
Mid-Troposphere: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tmt/uahncdc_mt_6.0.txt
Tropopause: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/ttp/uahncdc_tp_6.0.txt
Lower Stratosphere: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tls/uahncdc_ls_6.0.txt