2024 Sets New Record for Warmest Year In Satellite Era (Since 1979)
The Version 6.1 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for December, 2024 was +0.62 deg. C departure from the 1991-2020 mean, down slightly from the November, 2024 anomaly of +0.64 deg.
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The Version 6.1 global area-averaged temperature trend (January 1979 through December 2024) remains at +0.15 deg/ C/decade (+0.22 C/decade over land, +0.13 C/decade over oceans).
As seen in the following ranking of the years from warmest to coolest, 2024 was by far the warmest in the 46-year satellite record averaging 0.77 deg. C above the 30-year mean, while the 2nd warmest year (2023) was +0.43 deg. C above the 30-year mean. [Note: These yearly average anomalies weight the individual monthly anomalies by the number of days in each month.]
But 2025 will not be an easy year for dissenters and critics of the government, as this is increasingly being criminalized in Germany thanks to recently passed laws and acts that aim to suppress free speech.
The former head Germany’s Constitution Protection Authority (Bundesverfassungsschutz), Thomas Haldenwang (CDU Party), suggested last February when presenting measures to fight right-wing extremism, that human thoughts and speech patterns need to be under surveillance and become the business of the government: “It’s also about shifting verbal and mental boundaries. We have to be careful that thought and language patterns don’t become embedded in our language.”
by D. Blackmon, Jan 2, 2025 in ClimateChangeDispatch
President-elect Donald Trump has a big job ahead of him in restoring common sense and sanity to federal energy policy when he takes office on January 20. [emphasis, links added]
The last four years in this realm can more accurately be characterized as a series of ill-considered, irrational scams than as any sort of coherent, productive set of policies.
It has been four years of bad policies — largely based on crass crony capitalism principles — that have done severe damage to America’s level of energy security.
No doubt cleaning up this mess left behind by President Joe Biden and his appointees will take the full four years of Trump’s second term. But the new president will be able to take some fast actions to jump-start the process as part of his first 100-day agenda.
With respect, here is a list of 10 quick common-sense actions Trump can take to begin to restore America’s energy security:
1 — Rescind Biden’s ridiculous permitting “pause” on LNG export infrastructure. Of all the Biden energy policy scams, this was perhaps the most heinous and unjustified of all. Terminate it immediately and get this American growth industry back on track.
by Bjorn Borg, Jan 2, 2025 in ClimateChangeDispatch
Green Electricity Really Does Cost A Bundle
As nations use more and more supposedly cheap solar and wind power, a strange thing happens: Our power bills get more expensive. [emphasis, links added]
The claim that green energy is cheaper relies on bogus math that measures the cost of electricity only when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing.
Modern societies need around-the-clock power, requiring backup, often powered by fossil fuels. That means we’re paying for two power systems: renewables and backup.
Moreover, as fossil fuels are used less, those power sources need to earn their capital costs back in fewer hours, leading to even more expensive power.
This means the real energy costs of solar and wind are far higher than what green campaigners claim. One study shows that in China the real cost of solar power on average is twice as high as that of coal.
Similarly, a peer-reviewed study of Germany and Texas shows that solar and wind are many times more expensive than fossil fuels.
Germany, the U.K., Spain, and Denmark, all of which increasingly rely on solar and wind power, have some of the world’s most expensive electricity.
by J. Chadwick, Dec 31, 2024 in ClimateChangeDispatch
It’s been nearly 200 years since a global cold snap led to widespread crop failures and devastating famines. [emphasis, links added]
Now, a new study by scientists at the University of St Andrews finally pinpoints the cause.
The Zavaritskii volcano on the remote, uninhabited Russian island of Simushir, part of the Kuril Islands, erupted in 1831, the experts reveal.
The dramatic event injected volcanic ash into the atmosphere, blocking enough sunlight to induce a brief global cooling period.
The resulting change in weather included reduced rainfall from Africa and India to Japan, causing major famine due to poor crop yields.
‘While scientists have long known that a really big eruption went off in 1831, the source has remained a mystery,’ lead study author Dr Will Hutchison told MailOnline.
Dr Hutchison and his team were able to date and match the ice core deposits to Zavaritskii volcano on the remote, uninhabited island of Simushir. Source: University of St Andrews…
To imagine the kind of future a hotter, dryer climate may bring, and the geopolitical challenges it will create, look no farther than two parts of the world that Donald Trump wants America to control: Greenland and the Panama Canal.
The president-elect in recent days has insisted that both places are critical to United States national security. He’s called to reclaim control the Panama Canal from Panama and acquire Greenland from Denmark, both sovereign territories with their own governments.
They have something else in common as well: Both are significantly affected by climate change in ways that present looming challenges to global shipping and trade.
Because of warming temperatures, an estimated 11,000 square miles of Greenland’s ice sheets and glaciers have melted over the past three decades, an area roughly equivalent to the size of Massachusetts. That has huge implications for the entire world. If the ice melts completely, Greenland could cause sea levels to rise as much as 23 feet, according to NASA.
The greening of the Earth’s vegetated areas is “attributed to CO2 fertilization, climate change, and land use changes.”
New remote sensing research (Gutiérrez-Hernández and García, 2025) uses robust statistical methods to eliminate false positives and spurious correlations in establishing vegetation trends in the satellite era.
The scientists find 38% of the Earth’s land surface has undergone statistically significant greening or browning trends over the last 42 years (1982-2023). Conventional methods (i.e., Mann-Kendall test) that had previously found 51% of the Earth’s surface experienced statistically significant vegetation trends in the satellite era may overlook crucial factors that produce less accurate, inflated results.
With this new analytical method, the True Significant Trends (TCT) test, the authors have robustly determined there has been a “striking global greening trend” attributed to CO2 fertilization and climate change.
“Applying a new proposed workflow methodology (True Significant Trends, TST) we reveal a striking global greening trend, with a significant portion of the Earth’s terrestrial land surface showing increases in vegetation cover over the past four decades, particularly in Eurasia.”
Specifically, 76.1% to 85.4% of statistically significant vegetation trends indicate greening, whereas browning trends account for 14.7 to 23.9%
“Among these significant trends identified using the TST workflow, 76.07% indicated greening, while 23.93% indicated browning. Notably, considering areas (pixels) with NDVI values above 0.15, greening accounted for 85.43% of the significant trends, with browning making up the remaining 14.57%. These findings strongly validate the ongoing global greening of vegetation.”
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