Most realists are familiar with ‘hide the decline’ — the divergence problem in which post-1960 tree ring proxy data shows a clear temperature decline while official measured temperature data show a rise (i.e. ‘Climategate’).
As a physicist, John Droz holds in high regard the Scientific Method, a 400-year-old approach to investigating reality.
Rooted in Isaac Newton’s work, which included creation of the calculus, the Scientific Method has long underpinned examination of the physical world and technological advancement.
by L. Balzer, Oct 25, 2023 in ClimateChangeDispatch
We are repeatedly told that 97% of scientists agree that Earth’s climate is experiencing dangerous warming caused by human activities.
John Kerry, Biden’s climate czar, stated, “97 percent of peer-reviewed climate studies confirm that climate change is happening and that human activity is largely responsible.”
In 2009, 1,079 emails between climate scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in the United Kingdom and others working with them were released by a whistleblower in an incident that came to be known as Climategate.
This small group of scientists has been the most influential in driving worldwide alarm over global warming.
The emails they exchanged revealed that they were doing everything they could to keep scientists whose findings disagreed with theirs out of the peer review system.
A professional scientist’s career rests on his/her success in getting their studies published in peer-reviewed journals.
Phil Jones of CRU, writing to Michael Mann, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, about two papers that disagreed with their hypothesis, stated, “Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
Mann responded, “Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal?”
Jones assured him, “I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”
They demonstrated their hatred of skeptical scientists, rejoicing at the news that one of them had died.
One scientist, Ben Santer, told CRU, “The next time I see Pat Michaels [a dissenting scientist] at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him.”
Two years later in 2011, 5,000 more emails were leaked. These were even more startling and incriminatingthan the 1,079 released in 2009.
Myron Ebell commented, “If there were any doubts remaining after reading the first Climategate emails, the new batch of emails that appeared on the web today make it clear that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] is an organized conspiracy dedicated to tricking the world into believing that global warming is a crisis that requires a drastic response.”
by F. Menton, Oct 25, 2023 in ClimateChangeDispatch
It’s by far the most important scientific question of our age: Do human emissions of CO2 and other such “greenhouse gases” cause significant global warming, aka “climate change”?
Express any doubt about the causal connection between human activities and climate change, and you could very well get labeled as a “climate denier,” fired from your academic job, demonetized by Google or Facebook, or even completely ostracized from polite society.
But is there actually any real proof of the proposition at issue? In fact, there is not.
A new study out of Norway is exactly what was needed to shut down the climate alarmists. Its findings show that man has not set fire to his home planet.
Right from the top, in the abstract not 10 lines into the study, the authors get to the point. [emphasis, links added]
“Using theoretical arguments and statistical tests we find,” the researchers say, “that the effect of man-made CO2 emissions does not appear to be strong enough to cause systematic changes in the temperature fluctuations during the last 200 years.”
From there, the bad news only gets worse for priests of the climate religion.
“Even if [recently] recorded temperature variations should turn out to deviate from previous variation patterns in a systematic way, it is still a difficult challenge to establishhow much of this change is due to increasing man-made emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases.”
The researchers, from Statistics Norway, the government’s official data agency, also address the apparent “high degree of consensus among many climate researchers that the temperature increase of the last decades is systematic (and partly man-made),” while noting that it “is certainly the impression conveyed by the mass media.”
Of course, the climate zealots won’t like the study.
by R. Pielke Jr, Oct 23, 2023 in ClimateChangeDispatch
Physicist Richard Feynman once described a key difference between religion and science as follows: “Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.” Scientific reasoning and provisional truths that result are based on evidence, not simply belief.
As the debate has grown over the continued misuse of outdated climate scenarios in research and policy, I’ve noted a tendency for defenders of RCP8.5 to rely on decidedly unscientific justifications for its continued misuse. [emphasis, links added]
Among defenders of the indefensible are leading scientists and even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
For instance, the recent IPCC AR6 report acknowledged our recent work on scenario plausibility but reasserted the value of RCP8.5:
We have carefully read the definition of a “tipping point” as conveyed by the Potsdam Institute (PIK):
“It’s like a pencil that you push further and further over the edge of a table with your finger. First nothing happens – then it falls.” That’s what the PIK website says.
Nothing can bring the pencil back to the table except a failure of gravity, which is not conceivable. [emphasis, links added]
Then PIK lists various “elements” that are supposed to exhibit such behavior. To the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS), one finds:
There are indications that the tipping point, which leads to an almost complete loss of ice in the long term (about 10,000 years), could probably be reached at a global warming of just under 1.5°C (possible from 0.8°C global warming, at the latest at 3°C).“
Now there’s a paper on the subject that has appeared in “Nature“, which paints a different picture. It finds that even after a possibly “critical warming threshold” has been crossed, “the pencil does not fall down”:
We find several stable intermediate ice-sheet configurations … that return to the present-day state if the climate returns to present-day conditions.”
Recently, it has been shown that the Arctic warms four times faster than the global average and thus substantially exceeds previous estimates and projections from climate models.
Arctic amplification of this magnitude would reduce the safe space for the GrIS substantially. However, surface temperatures around Greenland might not increase that severely in the future.”
Observations since 2000 now show that during this period, the warming of the Arctic is far from uniform:
It’s been over 15-years since the release of the IPCC’s AR4 report which called for “run away melting” of Arctic sea ice. This bold proclamation, devised from a baseless extrapolating of a few ‘bad’ years, will be the ruin of the agency.
China’s Ministry of Commerce on Friday curbed exports of graphite, a critical mineral used in the production of lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles (EVs).
The move could make a shortage of graphite more likely at a time when worldwide EV demand is soaring.
China last year accounted for close to two-thirds of global production of graphite and all but 2% of spherical graphite output, the final product used in anodes for lithium-ion batteries.
EV makers such as Tesla, Rivian, and Lucid Motors, as well as traditional automakers that have developed their own EVs in recent years, could be at risk of production shortages.
With potential shortages looming, U.S. government officials have sought to incentivize domestic production of graphite and other minerals used in clean energy technologies.
Going by the steady, unbroken rise of atmospheric CO2 measured by Mauna Loa observatory, none of the money spent on climate conferences or the trillions of dollars spent on CO2 reduction measures to date have had any noticeable impact on global CO2. There is zero chance the hundred billion dollars per year recipient nations want will have an impact.
fter years of dabbling in this issue, John Christy and I have finally submitted a paper to Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology entitled, “Urban Heat Island Effects in U.S. Summer Surface Temperature Data, 1880-2015“.
I feel pretty good about what we’ve done using the GHCN data. We demonstrate that, not only do the homogenized (“adjusted”) dataset not correct for the effect of the urban heat island (UHI) on temperature trends, the adjusted data appear to have even stronger UHI signatures than in the raw (unadjusted) data. This is true of both trends at stations (where there are nearby rural and non-rural stations… you can’t blindly average all of the stations in the U.S.), and it’s true of the spatial differences between closely-space stations in the same months and years.
The bottom line is that an estimated 22% of the U.S. warming trend, 1895 to 2023, is due to localized UHI effects.
And the effect is much larger in urban locations. Out of 4 categories of urbanization based upon population density (0.1 to 10, 10-100, 100-1,000, and >1,000 persons per sq. km), the top 2 categories show the UHI temperature trend to be 57% of the reported homogenized GHCN temperature trend. So, as one might expect, a large part of urban (and even suburban) warming since 1895 is due to UHI effects. This impacts how we should be discussing recent “record hot” temperatures at cities. Some of those would likely not be records if UHI effects were taken into account.
Yet, those are the temperatures a majority of the population experiences. My point is, such increasing warmth cannot be wholly blamed on climate change.
One of the things I struggled with was how to deal with stations having sporadic records. I’ve always wondered if one could use year-over-year changes instead of the usual annual-cycle-an-anomaly calculations, and it turns out you can, and with extremely high accuracy. (John Christy says he did it many years ago for a sparse African temperature dataset). This greatly simplifies data processing, and you can use all stations that have at least 2 years of data.
Now to see if the peer review process deep-sixes the paper. I’m optimistic.
by A. Préat, Oct 13, 2023 in Science,Climate,Energy
An obvious fact
No one denies that the Earth’s temperature has been rising slightly by around 0.9°C for almost 125 years (see Soon et al., 2023 for details). This recent increase is minimal (0.6°C between 1975 and 1998) and framed by periods of temperature decrease of similar amplitude (1880-1910 and 1940-1975).
Our media, including the IPCC and many scientists, claim that the sole culprit for the current temperature rise is atmospheric CO2 levels, which are linked to human activity. This is a hypothesis, since no link has yet been established between temperature and CO2 content – quite the contrary (Davison, 2023). The climate alarmism (Watts, 2023) that occupies the front pages of our newspapers is not justified, as we shall see.
Geological cycles
This increase over more than a century is by no means exceptional; it has occurred many times before with much greater amplitudes, up to 20 times the recent increase, and over equally short periods. For example, in the Pleistocene (2.58 million years or ‘Ma’ to 11,700 years), researchers have counted more than 25 cycles with abrupt increases of +8°C to +16°C in 50 years each time (= ‘Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles’, see Boers, 2018, SCE, 2020 and here). These abrupt increases are to be compared with the recent increase of 0.3°C in 50 years (average 1880-2008). See SCE and SCE. Such cycles also exist in older geological periods, for example in the Jurassic (CNRS ; Boulila et al., 2022).
Several high-level journals (including Nature) have shown that the increase in CO2 follows that of temperature, mainly because of CO2 degassing in the oceans (see references in SCE, 2021). Note also that the current atmospheric CO2 content (0.04% or 400 ppm – ‘parts per million’) is twice what it was during the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles, which last between 1,500 and 4,500 years. It’s also worth noting that current atmospheric CO2 levels are the lowest since the Earth’s existence (4.65 billion years ago), apart from a short period of 100 Ma (in the Permian-Carboniferous transitional period) with the same levels as today. For almost 2% of its history, the level of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere has thus varied from several thousand ppm to several percent, i.e., from 3 to 25 times higher since the Cambrian, 541 Ma ago (geological scale here), when biodiversity exploded (with metazoans, here), and even much earlier during the Precambrian (Thomas, 2000 ; Préat, 2019 ; Lehmer et al., 2020). CO2 levels were sometimes higher than today’s during ice ages. Examples of warmer and colder periods are the rule in geology; just think of the Arctic (Svarlbad) at the beginning of the Holocene, around 11,000 years ago, which was +7°C warmer than the present, when CO2 levels were half the current level (Richard, 2020). Continuer la lecture de Origins of climate changes→
by Dr. M. Wielicki, Oct 19 2023 in Climate ChangeDispatch
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Antarctica presented a more complex picture. While the continent as a whole lost about 130 gigatons of ice each year during a similar timeframe, the loss was most pronounced in West Antarctica, especially around the Amundsen Sea sector.
This accelerated melting in West Antarctica is a matter of particular concern for researchers, as it is claimed to have the potential to destabilize larger sections of the Antarctic ice sheet, leading to more pronounced sea-level rise in the future.
Mass change of the Antarctic Ice Sheet from April 2002 to September 2020. Time series of mass change from the GRACE and GRACE-FO missions, M(t), for the entire Antarctic Ice Sheet (green) and its division into East Antarctica (blue), West Antarctica (red), and the Antarctic Peninsula (yellow). The vertical lines indicate the end of the GRACE and the beginning of the GRACE-FO monthly data availability (June 2017 and July 2018, respectively). Shadings represent 1-σuncertainties. Equivalent sea-level contribution (right axis) is approximated as 1 mm sea-level rise for 360 Gt of ice mass loss. Source
However, since early 2020, nearly 1,000 gigatons of ice have been added to Antarctica. This remarkable ice gain represents nearly one-third of the total ice loss since 2002.
This new paper in Nature Scientific Reports claims to identify a trend in hurricane intensification so significant that it’s utterly absurd that hurricane forecasters and modelers wouldn’t have noticed and identified it previously. This triggers an intense bright red bullshit detector.
There are many scientifically invalid assumptions in the “greenhouse gas hypothesis” that the editors of a journal, Earth System Dynamics (ESD), now insist they will never again allow to be subjected to critical analysis in future publications, as the editors of this journal are committed to only publishing studies agreeing with the “consensus.”
In a editorial comment published in the MDPI journal Entropy responding to an editorial written by the editors of ESD, two Portuguese scientists (Khmelinskii and Woodcock, 2023) identify at least 8 assumptions in the “greenhouse gas hypothesis” that lack scientific validation. Despite the lack of observational evidence supporting their viewpoints, proponents of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis prefer to dismiss and ignore challenges to what they believe is the “consensus” – the opposite of what the scientific method requires.
For brevity’s sake, only a few of the challenges are summarized below.
• CO2 can only absorb 10% of all radiation in the specific IR bands CO2 affects. CO2 “absorbs absolutely nothing at all other IR wavelengths.” Thus, CO2 has no effect on IR in 90% of absorption bands.
• CO2 can only absorb IR in the top 300 m, or 0.3 km, of the surface-troposphere, which is 10 km thick. Thus, CO2 can only affect 10% of the IR in 3% of the surface-troposphere, where climate change occurs.
• Because of its vanishingly small effects, doubling CO2 concentrations could only lead to a 0.015°C surface temperature change, at most. Understatedly, “this effect would not even be measurable.”
• Uncertainty in the Earth’s radiation balance is ±17 W/m². The estimated radiation imbalance is 0.6 W/m², which is “orders of magnitude” smaller than the uncertainty in its derivation. Thus, the “global balance of energy fluxes…cannot be derived from measured fluxes“… and this “profoundly affects our ability to understand how Earth’s climate responds to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases.”
The editors at ESD do not view observational uncertainty – or questions regarding the magnitude of CO2’s effects – as worthy of critical analysis.
by P. Homewood, Oct 6, 2023 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
The latest of many heat records broken this year is putting the world on course for its hottest year ever, and is a sign of what is to come in future, according to scientists.
Last month was not only the hottest September on record, new data has confirmed, but it was higher by a margin described by stunned scientists as “extraordinary”, “huge” and “whopping”.
I’ll ignore the ignorance of journalists who think that the world started in the 19thC, during the Little Ice Age. And the fact that a “global average temperature” is a meaningless construct, which assumes you can average completely different things.
According to satellite data, the temperature anomaly last month was 0.24C higher than the previous peak in 2016:
by P. Homewood, Oct 5, 2023 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
I have a prediction!
At the end of the year, the Met Office’s State of the Climate report will declare 2023 as a “Year of Extremes”.
It will highlight September as a particularly extreme month, with a heatwave (which peaked at temperatures several degrees lower than in 1906 and 1911); a monthly temperature no higher than in September 2006; and Storm Agnes.
I doubt whether anybody with any experience would find anything extreme about the weather last month. On the contrary, they will all be able to recall genuinely extreme autumn weather in the past.
For example, let;s look back to the 1960s, courtesy of Weatherweb:
2023 has been a hot year… We have the makings of a super-El Niño and an unprecedented injection of water vapor into the upper atmosphere stacked on top of a general warming trend since 1978, if not since the nadir of the Little Ice Age. So, it should come as no surprise that we have seen satellite-era record high temperatures, this summer and early fall.
As a geologist, I always have to apply scale and context to everything.
Scale
Temperature anomaly records are great tools. They are the only way to accurately describe how global temperatures are changing over time. However, they lack scale. They lack a frame of reference.
It is a common adage that when a geologist takes a photograph of a person, that person is simply there for scale. Other scale references include: camera lens covers (rendered obsolete by smart phones), quarters, rock hammers, spouses and action figures (on April Fools Day only). The key is to come up with a reference that is relatable. And what temperature reference is more relatable than a thermometer?
Figure 1. UAH 6.0 from WoodForTrees (l), UAH 6.0 at gas station thermometer scale.…
“Catastrophizing” the weather refers to the exaggerated portrayal or emphasis on the severity, frequency, or implications of weather events beyond what scientific data and historical context might suggest.
Over time, consistent exaggeration can erode public trust in weather forecasts and warnings. If people believe that threats are frequently overblown, they may become complacent and fail to take necessary precautions during genuinely severe events.
If authorities act on exaggerated weather forecasts, it could lead to the unnecessary allocation of resources, diverting them from regions or times where they might be genuinely needed.
The constant exposure to exaggerated disaster threats can induce unnecessary fear and anxiety among the public, potentially affecting mental well-being.
If every weather event is portrayed as a catastrophe, it becomes challenging for the public to discern which events pose genuine threats. This can dilute the urgency of actual severe weather warnings.
In the context of climate change, while it’s important to communicate the real risks associated with a warming planet, it’s equally essential to avoid undue alarmism.
Balanced, accurate communication ensures that the public remains informed, however, that is not what we commonly see.
by A. Finley, Oct 2, 2023 in ClimateChangeDispatch
Scientists were aghast last month when Patrick Brown, climate director at the Breakthrough Institute in Berkeley, Calif., acknowledged that he’d censored one of his studies to increase his odds of getting published.
Credit to him for being honest about something his peers also do but are loath to admit. [emphasis, links added]
Editors of scientific journals, he wrote, “have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives.”
Nature’s editor, Magdalena Skipper, denied that the journal has “a preferred narrative.” No doubt the editors at the New York Times and ProPublica would say the same of their own pages.
Mr. Brown’s criticisms aren’t new. In 2005 Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis wrote an essay titled “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”
He contended that scientists “may be prejudiced purely because of their belief in a scientific theory or commitment to their own findings.”
“The greater the financial and other interests and prejudices in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true,” Dr. Ioannidis argued.
“Many otherwise seemingly independent, university-based studies may be conducted for no other reason than to give physicians and researchers qualifications for promotion or tenure.”
In addition, many scientists use the peer-review process to suppress findings that challenge their own beliefs, which perpetuates “false dogma.”
As Dr. Ioannidis explained, the more scientists there are in a field, the more competition there is to get published and the more likely they are to produce “impressive ‘positive’ results” and “extreme research claims.” …snip…
The peer-review process is supposed to flag problems in studies that get submitted to journals. But as Dr. Ioannidis explained in a Sept. 22 JAMA editorial, the process is failing:
New research published in the MDPI journal atmosphere by Dr. Stuart A. Harris asserts past and modern climate changes are natural and not driven by variations in atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
Some key points from the paper include:
• Past and modern climate change is driven by solar cycle (Milankovitch) variations and their affect on ocean circulation and heat transport.
• Throughout the last hundreds of thousands of years, temperature changes precede the lagging changes in CO2.
• The UN IPCC position that atmospheric CO2 is the cause of the warming since the onset of the Industrial Revolution is only an assumption that is “not consistent with studies involving changes in temperature in rural areas of the northern [NH] hemisphere.”
• The natural 23 thousand year (23 ka) Milankovitch cycle has begun to reduce insolation in the NH “starting in 2020,” and this “heralds the start of the next glaciation.”
• CO2 is essential for life on Earth (photosynthesis), and a reduction in CO2 would be harmful to the biosphere. On the other hand, there “seems to be no connection between carbon dioxide and the temperature of the Earth.”
As all hurricane researchers lament, model predictions of when and where hurricanes will intensify, have not improved much in the past 20 years. As recently as the early 2010s, weather model forecasts failed to predict 88 percent of rapidly intensifying tropical storms. Nonetheless National Public Radio (NPR) has ranted that hurricanes are “intensifying more quickly, turning from less-serious storms to very strong ones in hours or days. Superheated ocean waters hold a lot of extra energy, and a growing storm can draw from that enormous pool.” But such “superheated water” is not widespread as rising CO2 narratives suggest, but found only in very limited regions and usually associated with “barrier layers”.
Hurricanes intensify as they draw “superheated” subsurface waters of 65.5°F or higher. However, when a hurricane’s suction pulls up cooler subsurface waters, the hurricane weakens. This negative feedback naturally limits the intensity of all hurricanes. In the upper panel of the attached graphic, Arnand (2023) illustrates where thin barrier layer exists, hurricane intensity hovers around Category 1. In contrast, where thick barrier layers form, cooler deep waters are prevented from reaching the surface, and instead allow superheated sub-surface waters to cause rapid intensification.
Denser fluids don’t naturally rise above less dense fluids! Barrier layer formation happens wherever freshwater overlays dense salty waters. Although solar heating would normally make subsurface waters less dense and rise to the surface, layers with higher saltiness makes the water more dense which inhibits warm convection. That traps and intensifies the subsurface heat, enabling hurricanes to intensify to Category 5.
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La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse
