by S. Hsiang et al., June 2017, Science
Estimates of climate change damage are central to the design of climate policies. Here, we develop a flexible architecture for computing damages that integrates climate science, econometric analyses, and process models. We use this approach to construct spatially explicit, probabilistic, and empirically derived estimates of economic damage in the United States from climate change.
by Indur M. Golkany, Ph.D., 2009, in J. of America. Phys.&Surgeons
Proponents of drastic greenhouse gas controls claim that human greenhouse gas emissions cause global warming, which then exacerbates the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, including extreme heat, droughts, floods, and storms such as hurricanes and cyclones.
In fact, even though reporting of such events is more complete than in the past, morbidity and mortality attributed to them has declined globally by 93%–98% since the 1920s
by Paul Homewood, June 30, 2017
For years, RSS have been an embarrassment to the climate establishment. Their satellite data has consistently shown the pause in global temperatures since 1998, which so many scientists have attempted to explain.
At the same time, the surface datasets of GISS, NOAA and HADCRUT have diverged, with the help of adjustments, to show much greater warming.
The pressure on RSS to conform has been immense, and now the inevitable has happened. Highly conveniently they have found huge errors in their previous version, and have now adjusted to a new version, v4, which miraculously finds that global warming has continued unabated after all!
by Dennis T. Avery, June 30, 2017 in WUWT
Carbon dioxide truly is “the gas of life.” The plants that feed us and wildlife can’t live without inhaling CO2, and then they exhale the oxygen that lets humans and animals keep breathing.
Our crop plants evolved about 400 million years ago, when CO2 in the atmosphere was about 5000 parts per million! Our evergreen trees and shrubs evolved about 360 million years ago, with CO2 levels at about 4,000 ppm. When our deciduous trees evolved about 160 million years ago, the CO2 level was about 2,200 ppm – still five times the current level.
See also here (in French)
by Dennis T. Avery, June 30, 2017 in ClimateChangeDispatch
Statistician Bjorn Lomborg had already pointed out that the Paris CO2 emission promises would cost $100 trillion dollars that no one has, and make only a 0.05-degree difference in Earth’s 2100 AD temperature. Others say perhaps a 0.2 degree C (0.3 degrees F) difference, and even that would hold only in the highly unlikely event that all parties actually kept their voluntary pledges.
by Kenneth Richard, June 29, 2017 in NoTricksZone
For the last 3 years, human CO2 emissions rates have not risen. In fact, according to the IEA, we burned slightly more fossil fuels in 2014 than we did in both 2015 and 2016.
Despite the lack of growth – even slight decline – in human emissions rates during 2014 – 2016, the atmospheric CO2 parts per million (ppm) concentration grew rapidly – by more than 8 ppm (397 ppm to 405 ppm).
by Washington University in St-Louis, June 29, 2017 in ScienceDaily
If aliens sent an exploratory mission to Earth, one of the first things they’d notice — after the fluffy white clouds and blue oceans of our water world — would be the way vegetation grades from exuberance at the equator through moderation at mid-latitudes toward monotony at higher ones. We all learn about this biodiversity gradient in school, but why does it exist?
by David Whitehouse, June 29, 2017
Between the start of 1997 and the end of 2014, average global surface temperature stalled. This 18-year period is known as the global warming pause, also sometimes referred to as the global warming hiatus. The rise in global temperatures that alarmed climate campaigners in the 1990s had slowed so much that the trend was no longer statistically significant. It has been the subject of much research and debate in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
by Paul Homewood, June 29, 2017
Sea level alarmists often claim that the rate of sea level rise is increasing. They need to do this to convince the public that the innocuous 7” or so of sea level rise experienced in the 20thC is suddenly going to turn into meters by 2100.
See also here
by Y. Xie, J. Huang and Y. Liu, June 26, 2017 in CO2Science
One of the many conundrums facing climate alarmists — who predict that dangerous future global warming will result from increasing concentrations of atmospheric CO2 — is the existence of the aptly-named “warming hiatus.” Also referred to as the “warming pause,” this phenomenon describes a nearly two-decade-long leveling off of global temperatures despite a ten percent increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration since 1998. The significance of these observations resides in the fact that all climate models project that temperatures should not be levelling off, but should be increasing (despite interannual variability) in direct consequence of the ongoing rise in atmospheric CO2.
by University of Cambridge, June 28, 2017 in ScienceDaily
Using a technique called ‘seismic noise interferometry’ combined with geophysical measurements, the researchers measured the energy moving through a volcano. They found that there is a good correlation between the speed at which the energy travelled and the amount of bulging and shrinking observed in the rock. The technique could be used to predict more accurately when a volcano will erupt. Their results are reported in the journal Science Advances.
by Michel de Rougemont, June 28, 2017 in WUWT
We hear that global warming is highly dependent on the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, this gas that is required to sustain life on Earth and that is also emitted when burning flammable stuff, such as wood, coal, mineral and organic oils, or methane.
If you are told “this depends on that”, you are invited to examine available data observed over time to draw a representation of this on the y-axis vs. that on the x-axis.
So, in all logic, you should be interested in a representation of the temperature evolution in dependence of the atmospheric CO2 concentration.
Yes, you should, but, looking hard into the latest IPCC Report (the fifth of Working Group I, to be precise), no diagram of that sort can be found among its 1535 pages.
by Andrew Follett, June 28 in ClimateChangeDipatch
The study found that dispersants broke up the oil into tiny droplets, making them less buoyant and unable to float to the surface. This meant that the oil formed a layer deep below the surface of the water, making it easier for microbes that live in the deep ocean to eat it. However, scientists weren’t able to measure the exact amount of oil eliminated by the microbes.
Due largely to these oil-eating bacteria, the Gulf of Mexico recovered from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill faster than scientists thought possible and has returned to pre-spill levels of environmental health.
by Prof. A. Collins and PhD A. Merdith, June 27, 2017
Earth is estimated to be around 4.5 billion years old, with life first appearing around 3 billion years ago.
To unravel this incredible history, scientists use a range of different techniques to determine when and where continents moved, how life evolved, how climate changed over time, when our oceans rose and fell, and how land was shaped. Tectonic plates – the huge, constantly moving slabs of rock that make up the outermost layer of the Earth, the crust – are central to all these studies.
Along with our colleagues, we have published the first whole-Earth plate tectonic map of half a billion years of Earth history, from 1,000 million years ago to 520 million years ago.
by Anthony Watts, June 27, 2017 in WUWT
Global temperatures have generally settled to +0.26°C compared to 1981-2010 climatology continuing downward glide thru 2017 (black line).
by Maja Sojtaric, June 27, 2017
The Eurasian ice sheet was an enormous conveyor of ice that covered most of northern Europe some 23,000 years ago. Its extent was such that one could have skied 4,500 km continuously across it – from the far southwestern isles in Britain to Franz Josef Land in the Siberian Arctic. Suffice to say its existence had a massive and extremely hostile impact on Europe at the time.
This ice sheet alone lowered global sea-level by over 20 meters. As it melted and collapsed, it caused severe flooding across the continent, led to dramatic sea-level rise, and diverted mega-rivers that raged on the continent. A new model, investigating the retreat of this ice sheet and its many impacts has just been published in Quaternary Science Reviews.
by University of Alberta, June 26, 2017 in ScienceDaily
For the past two years, U. Alberta geophysicist Mirko Van der Baan and his team have been poring over 30 to 50 years of earthquake rates from six of the top hydrocarbon-producing states in the United States and the top three provinces by output in Canada: North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas, West Virginia, Alberta, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan.
With only one exception, the scientists found no province- or state-wide correlation between increased hydrocarbon production and seismicity. They also discovered that human-induced seismicity is less likely in areas that have fewer natural earthquakes.
by E.M. Smith, June 26, 2017
Until cloud and precipitation data are adequate AND accounted for properly AND the error bands are low enough to cover 1/10 degree increments, we can’t say there is ANY effect from CO2 on temperature. It is at most a conjecture, and not a very good one. You can not ignore the major driver of changes of temperatures (as shown in the above graph) and then attribute temperature changes to something else by supposition.
by Cliff Mass, June 17, 2017
Should scientists and the media exaggerate the current and future impact of human-forced global warming to encourage people “to do the right thing”?
A number of scientists and media folks believe the answer is yes.
For me, the answer is an emphatic no, for reasons I will explain below. Let’s consider some of the arguments for and against and you can decide for yourself
by David Whitehouse, Financial Post, June 22, 2017
Some are adamant that the “hiatus” does not and never has existed, and will never change their minds. But the evidence is irrefutable. As a large number of influential climate scientists have just said in the journal Nature Geoscience, since the turn of the century there has been a substantial slowdown in warming that computer climate models did not predict or can explain. In fact, such models predict a warming twice that observed.
by P. Gosselin from F. Bosse and F. Vahrenholt, June 18, 2017
In May the sun was very quiet as sunspot number was a mere 18.8, which is only 36% of what is typical for the month this far into the cycle. Seven days saw no sunspot activity at all.
The following chart shows the current cycle, Solar Cycle 24 (red), compared to the mean of the previous cycles (blue) and the similarly behaving SC 5 (black).
It’s clear that the current cycle is significantly weaker than the mean and far weaker than the cycles we saw throughout most of the warming 20th century.
by N.-A. Mörner, June 2017, in J. Coastal Research
Fortunately, as revealed in a number of recent studies, proof of such an acceleration of sea level rise remains elusive (see the many reviews we have posted on this topic under the subheading of Sea Level here). The latest work to demonstrate that there is nothing unusual, unnatural or unprecedented about current rates of sea level rise comes from a paper written by sea level expert Nils-Axel Mörner (Mörner, 2017) and published in the Journal of Coastal Research.
by Ernst-Georg Beck, Discussion paper, May 2008
Since the 19th century, use of chemical methods has provided reliable atmospheric CO2 gas analyses results that have been obtained predominantly from the northern hemisphere. These direct chemical analyses results provide information on past atmospheric CO2 concentrations in addition to the modern direct atmospheric CO2 measurements since 1958 and the indirect reconstructions of past atmospheric CO2 from ice cores. Comprehensive literature indicates that the chemical methods have provided a systematic accuracy within ± 3 Vol% since 1857.
Interview par V. Anger-de Friberg, 8 février 2011, in Agora Vox
Serge Galam, directeur de recherche au CNRS, est physicien, théoricien du désordre et inventeur de la sociophysique. Il travaille sur la propagation démocratique d’opinions minoritaires, le phénomène des rumeurs, les effets du mensonge et de l’opposition systématique dans la formation de l’opinion publique, le soutien passif au terrorisme, les dictatures démocratiques, la formation des coalitions et la nature millénariste du réchauffement climatique.
by Willis Eschenbach, June 24, in WUWT
Now, people often discuss procedures like “removing the effects of the El Nino from the global temperature record”. What they mean is that they have noted the similarity between the temperature of the NINO3.4 region and the global temperature. Figure 1 shows that relationship as seen in the CERES data.
