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climate and geology

Geologically Generated Ice Cycles And Climate-Related Phenomena

by J.E. Kamis, Feb 28, 2024 in ClimateChangeDispatch

The term “Ice Age” implies that covering Earth’s surface with ice and then melting it is a single event.

As explained below, this process is not a single event but rather a reoccurring cycle that has three distinct phases: Ice Melt/End Phase, Ice Increase/Recovery Phase, and Normal Ice Extent/Stable Phase.

Ice Melt/End Phase

Approximately every 100,000 years, the Earth’s glaciers and seas reach their maximum extent. Suddenly and within 5,000 years nearly all the ice melts. I term this the Ice Melt Phase.

So, what causes this rapid melting of the ice? It is a geologically induced pulse of heat and gas emitted from all of Earth’s geological features. A more detailed explanation of the Ice Melt Phase follows.

In 1941 Serbian mathematician Milutin Milankovitch discovered that every 100,000 years, the Earth’s orbit around the sun, tilt angle of its axis, and wobble-type movement around the axis changes. Scientists called this process a Milankovitch Cycle.

Milankovitch concluded that these astronomical changes affected Earth’s long-term climate. Others have shown that these astronomical changes also act to greatly increase the gravitational stress on Earth.

Figure 1. 50,000-mile-long interconnected network of ocean floor fault zones and ice extent during an Ice Cycle. (Image credit Wikipedia, some labeling by J. Kamis).

In my opinion, this stress activates all of Earth’s geological features, most importantly the 50,000-mile-long interconnected network of deep ocean-floor fault zones (Figure 1). These fault zones form the boundary between continents and large segments of ocean-floor rock layers.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Meteorologist Debunks TIME Mag’s Claim That Jan 2024 Was Hottest On Record

by A. Watts, Feb 19, 2024 in ClimateChangeDispatch

An article in TIME Magazine (TIME) claims that January 2024 was the hottest ever on record for the planet. Titled, 2024 Had the Hottest January on Record Following 2023’s Hottest Year on Record the article is based on a single source of temperature data.

Data from multiple other sources of temperature measurements refute this claim. [emphasis, links added]

TIME refers to the Copernicus EU climate service as the source for its alarming claim. Copernicus EU issued a press release claiming:

January 2024 was the warmest January on record globally, with an average ERA5 surface air temperature of 13.14°C, 0.70°C above the 1991-2020 average for January and 0.12°C above the temperature of the previous warmest January, in 2020.

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The month was 1.66°C warmer than an estimate of the January average for 1850-1900, the designated pre-industrial reference period.

The problem with that is that they are using a reference period of 1850 to 1900 that no other climate data source uses; a period, not coincidentally, more than 100 years of global warming ago when the Earth was cooler than today.

For example, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) produced a map of the globe that shows a significantly lower global temperature for January 2024.

The GISS global value was just 1.20°C compared to the 1.66°C claimed by Copernicus is different because NASA GISS is using a base period of 1951 to 1980.

Copernicus seemingly cherry-picked the reference period to fit the climate crisis narrative, and TIME was too uninterested in seeking and presenting the truth to investigate the extraordinary claim, instead reporting it as an unchallenged fact.

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climate-debate

The Hockey Stick Trial: How Science Died In A D.C. Courtroom

by R .Darwall, Feb 20, 2024 in ClimateChangeDispatch

“Science,” wrote the philosopher Karl Popper, “is one of the very few human activities – perhaps the only one – in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected.”

The sub-title of Popper’s 1963 book Conjectures and Refutations, in which he argued that science progresses through inspired conjectures checked by attempts to refute them through criticism, is “The Growth of Scientific Knowledge.” [emphasis, links added]

Now, a six-person jury in Washington, DC has refuted Popper’s formulation of the uniqueness of science, finding in favor of climate scientist Michael Mann in the defamation suit he brought against Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn dating back to 2012.

Central to Mann’s case was his attempt to reconstruct global temperature over the previous millennium – the iconic “hockey stick” graph.

The graph shows global temperatures purportedly falling for centuries and suddenly shooting upward with the advent of the Industrial Revolution.

Mann’s hockey stick representation was derived principally from selected tree-ring data based on the assumption that tree rings constitute accurate proxies for temperature and are not contaminated by confounding factors such as rainfall, seasonal variability, and levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The results that Mann produced are also sensitive to decisions on and application of statistical techniques.

There can be little doubt of the hockey stick’s historical importance in developing and propagating what became the dominant scientific paradigm of climate change.

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climate-debate

Climate Model Bias 1: What is a Model?

by A. May, Feb 29, 2024 in WUWT

There are three types of scientific models, as shown in figure 1. In this series of seven posts on climate model bias we are only concerned with two of them. The first are mathematical models that utilize well established physical, and chemical processes and principles to model some part of our reality, especially the climate and the economy. The second are conceptual models that utilize scientific hypotheses and assumptions to propose an idea of how something, such as the climate, works. Conceptual models are generally tested, and hopefully validated, by creating a mathematical model. The output from the mathematical model is compared to observations and if the output matches the observations closely, the model is validated. It isn’t proven, but it is shown to be useful, and the conceptual model gains credibility.

Models are useful when used to decompose some complex natural system, such as Earth’s climate, or some portion of the system, into its underlying components and drivers. Models can be used to try and determine which of the system components and drivers are the most important under various model scenarios.

Besides being used to predict the future, or a possible future, good models should also tell us what should not happen in the future. If these events do not occur, it adds support to the hypothesis. These are the tasks that the climate models created by the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP)[1] are designed to do. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)[2] analyzes the CMIP model results, along with other peer-reviewed research, and attempts to explain modern global warming in their reports. The most recent IPCC report is called AR6.[3]

In the context of climate change, especially regarding the AR6 IPCC[4] report, the term “model,” is often used as an abbreviation for a general circulation climate model.[5] Modern computer general circulation models have been around since the 1960s, and now are huge computer programs that can run for days or longer on powerful computers. However, climate modeling has been around for more than a century, well before computers were invented. Later in this report I will briefly discuss a 19th century greenhouse gas climate model developed and published by Svante Arrhenius.

Besides modeling climate change, AR6 contains descriptions of socio-economic models that attempt to predict the impact of selected climate changes on society and the economy. In a sense, AR6, just like the previous assessment reports, is a presentation of the results of the latest iteration of their scientific models of future climate and their models of the impact of possible future climates on humanity.

Introduction

Modern atmospheric general circulation computerized climate models were first introduced in the 1960s by Syukuro Manabe and colleagues.[6] These models, and their descendants can be useful, even though they are clearly oversimplifications of nature, and they are wrong[7] in many respects like all models.[8] It is a shame, but climate model results are often conflated with observations by the media and the public, when they are anything but.

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