Tous les articles par Alain Préat

Full-time professor at the Free University of Brussels, Belgium apreat@gmail.com apreat@ulb.ac.be • Department of Earth Sciences and Environment Res. Grp. - Biogeochemistry & Modeling of the Earth System Sedimentology & Basin Analysis • Alumnus, Collège des Alumni, Académie Royale de Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux Arts de Belgique (mars 2013). http://www.academieroyale.be/cgi?usr=2a8crwkksq&lg=fr&pag=858&rec=0&frm=0&par=aybabtu&id=4471&flux=8365323 • Prof. Invited, Université de Mons-Hainaut (2010-present-day) • Prof. Coordinator and invited to the Royal Academy of Sciences of Belgium (Belgian College) (2009- present day) • Prof. partim to the DEA (third cycle) led by the University of Lille (9 universities from 1999 to 2004) - Prof. partim at the University of Paris-Sud/Orsay, European-Socrates Agreement (1995-1998) • Prof. partim at the University of Louvain, Convention ULB-UCL (1993-2000) • Since 2015 : Member of Comité éditorial de la Revue Géologie de la France http://geolfrance.brgm.fr • Since 2014 : Regular author of texts for ‘la Revue Science et Pseudosciences’ http://www.pseudo-sciences.org/ • Many field works (several weeks to 2 months) (Meso- and Paleozoic carbonates, Paleo- to Neoproterozoic carbonates) in Europe, USA (Nevada), Papouasia (Holocene), North Africa (Algeria, Morrocco, Tunisia), West Africa (Gabon, DRC, Congo-Brazzaville, South Africa, Angola), Iraq... Recently : field works (3 to 5 weeks) Congo- Brazzaville 2012, 2015, 2016 (carbonate Neoproterozoic). Degree in geological sciences at the Free University of Brussels (ULB) in 1974, I went to Algeria for two years teaching mining geology at the University of Constantine. Back in Belgium I worked for two years as an expert for the EEC (European Commission), first on the prospecting of Pb and Zn in carbonate environments, then the uranium exploration in Belgium. Then Assistant at ULB, Department of Geology I got the degree of Doctor of Sciences (Geology) in 1985. My thesis, devoted to the study of the Devonian carbonate sedimentology of northern France and southern Belgium, comprised a significant portion of field work whose interpretation and synthesis conducted to the establishment of model of carbonate platforms and ramps with reefal constructions. I then worked for Petrofina SA and shared a little more than two years in Angola as Director of the Research Laboratory of this oil company. The lab included 22 people (micropaleontology, sedimentology, petrophysics). My main activity was to interpret facies reservoirs from drillings in the Cretaceous, sometimes in the Tertiary. I carried out many studies for oil companies operating in this country. I returned to the ULB in 1988 as First Assistant and was appointed Professor in 1990. I carried out various missions for mining companies in Belgium and oil companies abroad and continued research, particularly through projects of the Scientific Research National Funds (FNRS). My research still concerns sedimentology, geochemistry and diagenesis of carbonate rocks which leads me to travel many countries in Europe or outside Europe, North Africa, Papua New Guinea and the USA, to conduct field missions. Since the late 90's, I expanded my field of research in addressing the problem of mass extinctions of organisms from the Upper Devonian series across Euramerica (from North America to Poland) and I also specialized in microbiological and geochemical analyses of ancient carbonate series developing a sustained collaboration with biologists of my university. We are at the origin of a paleoecological model based on the presence of iron-bacterial microfossils, which led me to travel many countries in Europe and North Africa. This model accounts for the red pigmentation of many marble and ornamental stones used in the world. This research also has implications on the emergence of Life from the earliest stages of formation of Earth, as well as in the field of exobiology or extraterrestrial life ... More recently I invested in the study from the Precambrian series of Gabon and Congo. These works with colleagues from BRGM (Orléans) are as much about the academic side (consequences of the appearance of oxygen in the Paleoproterozoic and study of Neoproterozoic glaciations) that the potential applications in reservoir rocks and source rocks of oil (in collaboration with oil companies). Finally I recently established a close collaboration with the Royal Institute of Natural Sciences of Belgium to study the susceptibility magnetic signal from various European Paleozoic series. All these works allowed me to gain a thorough understanding of carbonate rocks (petrology, micropaleontology, geobiology, geochemistry, sequence stratigraphy, diagenesis) as well in Precambrian (2.2 Ga and 0.6 Ga), Paleozoic (from Silurian to Carboniferous) and Mesozoic (Jurassic and Cretaceous) rocks. Recently (2010) I have established a collaboration with Iraqi Kurdistan as part of a government program to boost scientific research in this country. My research led me to publish about 180 papers in international and national journals and presented more than 170 conference papers. I am a holder of eight courses at the ULB (5 mandatory and 3 optional), excursions and field stages, I taught at the third cycle in several French universities and led or co-managed a score of 20 Doctoral (PhD) and Post-doctoral theses and has been the promotor of more than 50 Masters theses.
better to know...?

Climate Scaremongers Take Note: It Was Hotter In 1976!

by P. Homewood, Sep 13, 022 in ClimateChange Dispatch

For weeks we have been told that this year’s warm summer is due to climate change.

The BBC’s Justin Rowlatt was quite clear: ‘We know what is behind this – greenhouse gas emissions caused by our burning of fossil fuels like coal and gas,’ a message amplified across the media and stoked by the Met Office, who delighted in their red warnings and public health alerts. [bold, links added]

It was not only the heat. The Met Office claimed that this summer’s drought is a harbinger of the future we could expect, ably assisted by fraudulently misleading images of ‘dried up reservoirs’ on BBC News.

As many of us suspected all along, the summer of 2022 was not a record breaker at all, as it was much hotter in 1976, as the Central England Temperature Series makes clear:

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/data/meantemp_seasonal_totals.txt

 

Indeed it was hotter in 1826 and 2018, and this summer was no hotter than in 1995 and 2006.

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better to know...?

A breakthrough discovery in carbon capture conversion for ethylene production

by University of Illinois Chicago, Sep 9, 2022 in ScienceDaily

A team of researchers led by Meenesh Singh at University of Illinois Chicago has discovered a way to convert 100% of carbon dioxide captured from industrial exhaust into ethylene, a key building block for plastic products.

Their findings are published in Cell Reports Physical Science.

While researchers have been exploring the possibility of converting carbon dioxide to ethylene for more than a decade, the UIC team’s approach is the first to achieve nearly 100% utilization of carbon dioxide to produce hydrocarbons. Their system uses electrolysis to transform captured carbon dioxide gas into high purity ethylene, with other carbon-based fuels and oxygen as byproducts.

The process can convert up to 6 metric tons of carbon dioxide into 1 metric ton of ethylene, recycling almost all carbon dioxide captured. Because the system runs on electricity, the use of renewable energy can make the process carbon negative.

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unclassified

Claim: The World is On the Brink of Five Climate Tipping Points

by E. Worrall, Sep 12, 2022 in WUWT

Is anyone else fed up with us approaching but never actually crossing all those dangerous tipping points?

World on brink of five ‘disastrous’ climate tipping points, study finds

Giant ice sheets, ocean currents and permafrost regions may already have passed point of irreversible change

Damian CarringtonEnvironment editor
@dpcarringtonFri 9 Sep 2022 04.00 AEST

The climate crisis has driven the world to the brink of multiple “disastrous” tipping points, according to a major study.

It shows five dangerous tipping points may already have been passed due to the 1.1C of global heating caused by humanity to date.

These include the collapse of Greenland’s ice cap, eventually producing a huge sea level rise, the collapse of a key current in the north Atlantic, disrupting rain upon which billions of people depend for food, and an abrupt melting of carbon-rich permafrost.

At 1.5C of heating, the minimum rise now expected, four of the five tipping points move from being possible to likely, the analysis said. Also at 1.5C, an additional five tipping points become possible, including changes to vast northern forests and the loss of almost all mountain glaciers.

In total, the researchers found evidence for 16 tipping points, with the final six requiring global heating of at least 2C to be triggered, according to the scientists’ estimations. The tipping points would take effect on timescales varying from a few years to centuries.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/08/world-on-brink-five-climate-tipping-points-study-finds

The abstract of the study;

Exceeding 1.5°C global warming could trigger multiple climate tipping points

David I. Armstrong McKay* https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0020-7461 d.mckay@exeter.ac.uk
Arie Staal https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5409-1436
Jesse F. Abrams https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0411-8519
Ricarda Winkelmann https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1248-3217
Boris Sakschewski https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7230-9723
Sina Loriani https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6660-960X
Ingo Fetzer https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7335-5679
Sarah E. Cornell https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4367-1296
Johan Rockström
Timothy M. Lenton* https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6725-7498 d.mckay@exeter.ac.uk

9 Sep 2022

Vol 377, Issue 6611

DOI: 10.1126/science.abn7950

Climate tipping points occur when change in a part of the climate system becomes self-perpetuating beyond a warming threshold, leading to substantial Earth system impacts. Synthesizing paleoclimate, observational, and model-based studies, we provide a revised shortlist of global “core” tipping elements and regional “impact” tipping elements and their temperature thresholds. Current global warming of ~1.1°C above preindustrial temperatures already lies within the lower end of some tipping point uncertainty ranges. Several tipping points may be triggered in the Paris Agreement range of 1.5 to <2°C global warming, with many more likely at the 2 to 3°C of warming expected on current policy trajectories. This strengthens the evidence base for urgent action to mitigate climate change and to develop improved tipping point risk assessment, early warning capability, and adaptation strategies.

Read more (paywalled): https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abn7950

Unfortunately the study is paywalled, so I can’t tell you the timeframe of these alleged tipping points. Not that the predicted dates matter that much – in my experience, tipping point predictions are usually quietly ignored or deleted when the deadline expires.

climate-debate

Global models underestimate large decadal declining and rising water storage trends relative to GRACE satellite data

by B.R. Scanlon et al., Jan 22, 2018 in PNAS

Significance

We increasingly rely on global models to project impacts of humans and climate on water resources. How reliable are these models? While past model intercomparison projects focused on water fluxes, we provide here the first comprehensive comparison of land total water storage trends from seven global models to trends from Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, which have been likened to giant weighing scales in the sky. The models underestimate the large decadal (2002–2014) trends in water storage relative to GRACE satellites, both decreasing trends related to human intervention and climate and increasing trends related primarily to climate variations. The poor agreement between models and GRACE underscores the challenges remaining for global models to capture human or climate impacts on global water storage trends.

Abstract

Assessing reliability of global models is critical because of increasing reliance on these models to address past and projected future climate and human stresses on global water resources. Here, we evaluate model reliability based on a comprehensive comparison of decadal trends (2002–2014) in land water storage from seven global models (WGHM, PCR-GLOBWB, GLDAS NOAH, MOSAIC, VIC, CLM, and CLSM) to trends from three Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite solutions in 186 river basins (∼60% of global land area). Medians of modeled basin water storage trends greatly underestimate GRACE-derived large decreasing (≤−0.5 km3/y) and increasing (≥0.5 km3/y) trends. Decreasing trends from GRACE are mostly related to human use (irrigation) and climate variations, whereas increasing trends reflect climate variations. For example, in the Amazon, GRACE estimates a large increasing trend of ∼43 km3/y, whereas most models estimate decreasing trends (−71 to 11 km3/y). Land water storage trends, summed over all basins, are positive for GRACE (∼71–82 km3/y) but negative for models (−450 to −12 km3/y), contributing opposing trends to global mean sea level change. Impacts of climate forcing on decadal land water storage trends exceed those of modeled human intervention by about a factor of 2. The model-GRACE comparison highlights potential areas of future model development, particularly simulated water storage. The inability of models to capture large decadal water storage trends based on GRACE indicates that model projections of climate and human-induced water storage changes may be underestimated.
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better to know...?

Reasons to avoid false balance and fake debates

by W. Baerbel and J. Cook, Sep 9, 2022 in SkepticalScience

False balance media reporting

One of the most insidious, albeit often inadvertent forms of climate misinformation is false-balance media  coverage, where contrarian voices are given equal coverage with climatescientists. This stems from the journalistic norm assuming there are always two sides to an issue, thus giving mainstream and contrarian voices equal representation. As a result, a few dissenting scientists are given similar attention to the 97% of scientists who are convinced that humans are causing global warming.

debate

Analysis of media coverage from 1988 to 2002 showed that newspapers often presented false balance media coverage of climate change [18]. While the situation has improved in prestige-press coverage [19], the tabloid press has shown no signs of improvement [20]. Similarly, 70% of U.S. TV coverage of climate change presents a false balance [21]. In short, much of what people learn about climate change from the media involves well-established scientific truth presented alongside groundless assertions.

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To debate or not to debate

Debate is crucially important to climate science and in the case of human-caused climate change has already occurred over decades. The process of scientific debate is open to anyone—although it does require that participants subject their ideas to the scrutiny of the peer-review process, which is fundamental for the advancement of scientific knowledge [31]. However, contrarians refuse to participate in scientific debates: they do not present their views at scientific conferences, and have a negligible presence in the peer-reviewed literature. Instead, they demand special treatment by bypassing the usual scientific process and presenting unvetted ideas to the public.

How should one respond if invited to publicly debate mainstream climate science? Requests to “debate” climate science or the timing of climate impacts are for propaganda purposes and should be avoided.  Agreeing to participate in such debates run the risk of misinforming the public by conveying the false impression that the scientific community is undecided on basic facts like human-caused global warming.

In contrast, debates over solutions to climate change are worthwhile. One response to an invitation to debate is to inform the organisers of the danger of misinforming the public by debating established science, and that a more appropriate and constructive debate topic is climate solutions. If the organisers persist in hosting a problematic debate, a further option is to issue a public statement explaining that you had advised the organisers not to go ahead due to the problematic nature of the event, but they went ahead regardless.

unclassified

A Much Larger Greenhouse Effect – But Temperatures Dominated by Cooling

by W. Röst, Sep 9, 2022 in WUWT

Abstract

The Earth’s greenhouse effect is much larger than suggested so far. If surface radiation and the greenhouse effect set surface temperatures, our oceans would be boiling. Fortunately, they don’t. Water Earth has a strong water-vapor-based evaporative surface cooling mechanism that effectively sets and stabilizes surface temperatures at a much lower level than cooling by surface radiation emissions can do. Thanks to water vapor our temperature system is far more stable than admitted by the consensus, and thanks to water, water vapor, and clouds surface temperatures are favorable for present life.

Introduction

Early Earth consisted of hot molten lava covered by an extreme greenhouse atmosphere: hardly any surface radiation could reach space, if any. Nevertheless, its surface cooled. Upward convection brought sensible and latent heat from hot surfaces to elevations on the very edge of the atmosphere from where energy effectively could be radiated into space. Despite the near maximal greenhouse effect the surface of Early Earth cooled down and at a certain moment the first oceans developed. Those boiling oceans still resulted in a huge upward convective transport of energy, further cooling the surface. Until now, convective upward transport of energy plays the main role in surface cooling. Convection sets and regulates surface temperatures at actual level. Without evaporative-convective-cloud-cooling, our actual greenhouse atmosphere would theoretically result in a surface temperature of 202.3°C. On the real Earth the greenhouse effect warms the surface, but greenhouse warming does not set and control final surface temperatures. Earth’s H2O-based cooling system does.

Theoretical greenhouse effect

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Conclusions

The Earth’s greenhouse effect is huge, much higher than normally assumed. If cooled by ‘surface radiation only’ the surface of a theoretical planet would have had a surface temperature of 202.3°C. But the Earth’s surface temperatures are not set by the strength of Earth’s greenhouse effect. Additional H2O-based cooling systems keep the surface at a much lower temperature, balancing rising surface radiation uptake. At present, that balance is reached at a yearly average of 15 degrees Celsius.

Thanks to H2O-related surface cooling the Earth’s surface temperatures are bound to a narrow range, at a temperature level well suited for life on Earth. Due to its stability, life developed over many hundreds of millions of years.

Temperature regulates the cooling system; the cooling system regulates temperature.

better to know...?

Meet Climate Skeptic Jacob Rees-Mogg, New UK Energy Secretary

by A. Macaskill and P. Sandle, Sep 8, 2022 in ClimateChangeDispatch

Britain appointed lawmaker Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has expressed skepticism about the need to fight ‘climate change’ as the new business secretary, raising concerns that he could delay the target of reducing net zero emissions by 2050.

Rees-Mogg, nicknamed “the honorable gentleman from the 18th century” because of his poshness and trademark double-breasted suit, was on Tuesday put in charge of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, which is responsible for the government’s strategy on ‘climate change’. [bold, links added]

In the past, Rees-Mogg has expressed concerns about “climate alarmism“, said humanity should adapt to, rather than mitigate, ‘climate change’, and warned that the drive to getting to net zero emissions is responsible for high energy prices.

After his appointment, Rees Mogg said his priority would be to provide help for people dealing with sharply higher energy bills and that the government will soon bring forward a package to help the public.

New Prime Minister Liz Truss has backed the legally binding target of reducing net zero ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions by the middle of this century, but has supported scrapping green levies and bringing back fracking if there is local support.

One contentious issue facing Rees-Mogg is providing a clear and settled policy environment for business after successive Conservative governments have produced energy and industrial strategies that were abandoned just a few years later.

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better to know...?

Greenpeace Cofounder Says Climate Change Based On False Narratives

by L. Yun-Jeong, Sep 9,  2022 in ClimateChangeDispatch

Patrick Moore [pictured], one of the founders of Greenpeace, said in an email obtained by The Epoch Times that his reasons for leaving Greenpeace were very clear: “Greenpeace was ‘hijacked’ by the political left when they realized there was money and power in the environmental movement.

[Left-leaning] political activists in North America and Europe changed Greenpeace from a science-based organization to a political fundraising organization,” Moore said. [bold, links added]

Moore left Greenpeace in 1986, 15 years after he co-founded the organization.

“The ‘environmental’ movement has become more of a political movement than an environmental movement,” he said. “They are primarily focused on creating narratives, stories, that are designed to instill fear and guilt into the public so the public will send them money.”

He said they mainly operate behind closed doors with other political operatives at the U.N., World Economic Forum, and so on, all of which are primarily political in nature.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] is “not a science organization,” he said. “It is a political organization composed of the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program.”

“The IPCC hires ‘scientists’ to provide them with ‘information’ that supports the ‘climate emergency’ narrative.”

Their campaigns against fossil fuels, nuclear energy, CO2, plastic, etc., are misguided and designed to make people think the world will come to an end unless we cripple our civilization and destroy our economy. They are now a negative influence on the future of both the environment and human civilization.”

“Today, the left has adopted many policies that would be very destructive to civilization as they are not technically achievable. Only look at the looming energy crisis in Europe and the UK, which Putin is taking advantage of. But it is of their own making in refusing to develop their own natural gas resources, opposing nuclear energy, and adopting an impossible position on fossil fuels in general,” Moore wrote.

The Left ‘Hijacked’ Greenpeace

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better to know...?, climate-debate

When German Environmentalists and Putin’s Government Had a Burning Love Affair

by D. Godefridi, Sept 8, 2022 in GatestoneInstitue

  • In 2011, the German Baltic Sea Nature Conservation Foundation was established as a result of an agreement between three of Germany’s leading environmental organizations – WWF, BUND and NABU – and the company Nord Stream, which is a subsidiary of the government of Vladimir Putin.
  • These environmental organizations were, moreover, at the same time fiercely opposed to German civil nuclear power, to the exploitation of shale gas in Europe and to the import of American gas via the construction of liquefied petroleum gas terminals in Germany.
  • Those were three issues where the views of the environmental organizations were totally congruent with those of the Russian Federation. This meant betting everything on “red” — as in a casino — but in this instance, on Russian gas.
  • Right after these contractual commitments by Nord Stream AG, the environmental organizations withdrew the lawsuit they had initiated against Nord Stream…
  • The German press reported last month that, inspired by the success of the first foundation, the same State of Mecklenberg-Western Pomerania was setting up a new foundation as recently as January 2021, the Mecklenberg-Western Pomerania Foundation for Climate and Environmental Protection, this time endowed with 192 million euros from the Russian government.
Those were… issues where the views of the environmental organizations were totally congruent with those of the Russian Federation. This meant betting everything on ‘red’ — as in a casino – but in this instance, on Russian gas. Pictured: The corporate headquarters of Gazprom Germania, the German unit of Russian natural gas company Gazprom, photographed on March 30, 2022 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
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better to know...?, climate and geology

Ultra-depleted hydrogen isotopes in hydrated glass record Late Cretaceous glaciation in Antarctica

by D.A. Nelson et al. , Sept 7, 2022 in NatureCommunications

Abstract

The Early Jurassic Butcher Ridge Igneous Complex (BRIC) in the Transantarctic Mountains contains abundant and variably hydrated silicic glass which has the potential to preserve a rich paleoclimate record. Here we present Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopic data that indicates BRIC glasses contain up to ~8 wt.% molecular water (H2Om), and low (<0.8 wt.%) hydroxyl (OH) component, interpreted as evidence for secondary hydration by meteoric water. BRIC glasses contain the most depleted hydrogen isotopes yet measured in terrestrial rocks, down to δD = −325 ‰. In situ 40Ar/39Ar geochronology of hydrated glasses with ultra-depleted δD values yield ages from 105 Ma to 72 Ma with a peak at c. 91.4 Ma. Combined, these data suggest hydration of BRIC glasses by polar glacial ice and melt water during the Late Cretaceous, contradicting paleoclimate reconstructions of this period that suggest Antarctica was ice-free and part of a global hot greenhouse.

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climate-debate

Pre-1970s ‘Global’ Sea Surface Temp Measurements Are No More Reliable Or Accurate Than Guessing

by K. Richard, Sept 8, 2022 in NoTricksZone

The accuracy of the long-term global instrumental temperature record – especially the data obtained before the 1970s – wholly rests on the assumption that sailors obtained precisely reliable temperature measurements as they pulled wooden or canvas buckets out of the water from ships at random depths, locations, and times of day. They didn’t.

It has long been known that pulling a bucket out of the water from a ship is rooted in serious error, rendering the sea surface temperature (SST) data obtained nearly useless. Ashford (1948) summarized some of the more salient reliability problems with this method of measurement.

• The initial temperature of the bucket is generally different from that of the sea.

• The water in the bucket may change its temperature before the reading is taken owing to the processes of heat exchange and evaporation.

• The initial temperature of the thermometer is generally different from that of the sample.

• The thermometer is liable to scale errors.

• Owing to thermal lag, the thermometer may take an appreciable time to indicate the true temperature of the sample.

• If the thermometer is removed from the bucket when taking the reading, it may no longer indicate the true water temperature.

• The temperature may be read incorrectly.

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better to know...?

Polar Opposite: Polar Bears Require Thin Ice Or Open Water To Survive

by K. Richard, Sept 5, 2022 in NoTricksZone

Abundant polar bear remains dating to 8000 to 9000 years ago have been found on Zhokhov Island, which is today surrounded by year-round sea ice (even in summer). This Arctic latitude (76°N) is too cold and thus too ice-covered for polar bears to inhabit today.

During the Early Holocene CO2 concentrations ranged between 255 to 265 ppm, and yet the Arctic was 5-7°C warmer than it is today and many regions that are now sea ice-covered were sea ice-free.

For example, Zhokhov Island is tundra and treeless today. It’s surrounded by permanent sea ice, making it inaccessible to wildlife.

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better to know...?, Cooling

A substantial stratospheric cooling event is now being observed over the Southern Hemisphere following a massive injection of water vapor

by A. Flis, Aug 29, 2022 in SevereWeatherEurope

Strong cold anomalies are being detected in the stratosphere over Southern Hemisphere. The anomalous cooling results from the water vapor coming from the January Hunga Tonga eruption. Cooling on this scale has not been seen in modern satellite records, so this is a significant event.

We will look at what is happening with temperatures in the southern stratosphere, how it all actually happened, and how it might impact our side of the planet in the upcoming Winter 2022/2023.

global-stratospheric-cooling-water-vapor-polar-vortex-winter-warming-event-ssw-pressure-temperature

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better to know...?, climate-debate

“The Weaponization of Science: Politics, Vilification, and the Climate Debate”

by W. Soon, April 11, 2022 in CeresScience

On April 11, 2022, CERES team-leader, Dr. Willie Soon’s gave a presentation in Washington D.C., “The Weaponization of Science: Politics, Vilification, and the Climate Debate”. The slides for the talk can be downloaded from https://tinyurl.com/49sbxhru.

 

Here are 7 short clips taken from the talk describing each of the main topics he covered. The clips are as follows:

  1. Is Dr. Willie Soon in the pay of the fossil fuel industry? (9:28 minutes)

  2. Why Greenpeace is looking for a piece of your green (6:10 minutes)

  3. Why “97% consensus on climate change” claims are wrong (3:29 minutes)

  4. Are the UN’s IPCC climate reports scientifically objective? (6:52 minutes)

  5. The “hockey stick” debate: Was there a Medieval Warm Period? (9:21 minutes)

  6. How much of a role does the Sun play in climate change? (3:33 minutes)

  7. Are “fact checks” checking facts or checking narratives? (2:47 minutes)

We think that these clips answer many of the commonly asked questions about both (1) the politicization of climate science and (2) the causes of climate change. Please feel free to subscribe to our new YouTube channel, share any of the above videos you think are interesting, or even share this post linking to all of them.

 

For convenience, we have embedded all 7 clips below:

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better to know...?

The Fall of ‘Nature’

by Bo Winegard, Aug 28, 2022 in Quilette

A once-respected journal has announced that it will be subordinating science to ideology.

And science, we should insist, better than any other discipline, can hold up to its students and followers an ideal of patient devotion to the search for objective truth, with vision unclouded by personal or political motive.
~Sir Henry Hallett Dale

Although the modern prestige bestowed upon science is laudable, it is not without peril. For as the ideological value of science increases, so too does the threat to its objectivity. Slogans and hashtags can quickly politicize science, and scientists can be tempted to subordinate the pursuit of the truth to moral or political ends as they become aware of their own prodigious social importance. Inconvenient data can be suppressed or hidden and inconvenient research can be quashed. This is especially true when one political tribe or faction enjoys disproportionate influence in academia—its members can disfigure science (often unconsciously) to support their own ideological preferences. This is how science becomes more like propaganda than empiricism, and academia becomes more like a partisan media organization than an impartial institution.

An editorial in Nature Human Behavior provides the most recent indication of just how bad things are becoming. It begins, like so many essays of its kind, by announcing that, “Although academic freedom is fundamental, it is not unbounded.” When the invocation of a fundamental freedom in one clause is immediately undermined in the next, we should be skeptical of whatever follows. But in this case, the authors are taking issue with a view very few people actually hold. At minimum, most academics will readily accept that scientific curiosity should be constrained by ethical concerns about research participants.

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unclassified

‘Hurricane Season Slowest Start In 30 Years’: Media Spin Begins

by A. Watts, Aug 29, 2022 in ClimateChangeDispatch

Back in May, many media outlets ran with this headline courtesy of a press release from NOAA:

NOAA predicts above-normal 2022 Atlantic Hurricane Season

Media outlets like Houston Public Media trumpeted it as if it was fact, saying: [bold, links added]

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released its 2022 Atlantic Hurricane Forecast, predicting an “above normal” hurricane season.

NOAA says there is a 70% chance of 14-21 storms forming, with as many as ten potentially becoming hurricanes. Three to six of these storms could become major hurricanes.

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climate-debate

Arctic-Wide Glaciers And Ice Caps Were Absent Or Smaller Than Today From 10,000 To 3000 Years Ago By Kenneth Richard on 29. August 2022

by K. Richard, Aug 29, 2022 in NoTricksZone

A new study details how a much warmer climate than today led to the disappearance of glaciers and ice caps during the sub-300 ppm CO2 Early to Middle Holocene. The Arctic’s modern ice extent is among the largest of the last 10,000 years.

Glaciologists Larocca and Axford (2022) have synthesized a comprehensive record of Arctic-wide glaciers and ice caps (GICs) situated near lakes for Greenland, Alaska, Arctic Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, Svalbard, and the Russian Arctic.

They compared the current volume and extent of GICs to past Holocene periods when they were either 1) smaller than present or 2) absent, with the latter characterizations signifying greater Arctic warmth.

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Contrary to the popular view that the modern glacier and ice cap extents are unprecedentedly small or on the verge of disappearing for the first time ever, the authors found more than half the Arctic’s GICs that exist today either did not exist or were smaller than today from 10,000 to 3400 years ago, when atmospheric CO2 ranged between 260 and 270 ppm.

Furthermore, most (“80% or more”) were smaller than today or absent from 7900 to 4500 years ago, which was the peak of this interglacial’s Arctic warmth – multiple degrees Celsius warmer than today.

The following images from the paper document the “Percent of GICs smaller or absent” for each region over the course of the last 10,000 years or more. Notice that between 80% to 100% of GICs were smaller than today or absent from about 8000 and 4000 years ago, and that even the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods had lower GICs extent than today.

The largest glacier and ice cap extent of the Holocene has been realized in the last millennium, suggesting any recession of GICs in the last few centuries is but a partial return to a former period of much greater warmth.

climate-debate

Northern Europe Mid Summer Hasn’t Warmed In 25 Years….Late Summer Arctic Ice Near 15-Year High!

by P. Gosselin, Aug 26, 2022 in NoTricksZone

This summer it’s been warm and awfully dry across mush of Europe. But in terms of global warming and the so-called Arctic tipping point, i.e. a point where the Arctic sea ice melts and theoretically sets off an unstoppable chain of catastrophic events – we look at the midsummer trends of Scandinavia and Finland, and then the Arctic.

As you’ll see, there’s been signs of an Arctic tipping point over the past 15 years.

The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) has the latest mean temperature data for July and today we plot the July data from Sweden and Finland for the stations for which the JMA has sufficient data.

We begin with Finland:

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climate-debate

Scientists: Only 10% Of The 1984-2017 Greenhouse Gas (Longwave) Forcing Was From CO2

by K. Richard, Aug 25, 2022 in NoTricksZone

A late 2021 study finds water vapor and temperature changes accounted for 90% of the changes in clear-sky downwelling longwave or greenhouse effect forcing since the mid-1980s. CO2 forcing assumed a mere bit-player role.

The seminal Feldman et al. (2015) study concluded it takes 10 years and a 22 ppm increase in CO2 to account for just one-tenth of the total longwave or greenhouse effect forcing in recent (2000-2010) climate change trends. The remaining longwave forcing contribution is from water vapor and clouds.

 

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climate-debate

Numbers — Tricky Tricky Numbers: Part 3

by Kip Hansen, Aug 25, 2022 in WUWT

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Bottom Lines:

1.  To support a claim that the Earth’s Climate System is “getting hotter” one has to have a long-term time series of measurements of heat in the climate system.

2.  Current Global Mean Temperature data sets do not measure heat and thus can not supply evidence for #1.

3.  The lack of such a time-series doesn’t mean that the Earth’s climate isn’t gaining energy (heat) – it simply means we don’t have any reliable measure of it.

4.  Climate Science may have some evidence of long-term energy gain or what is commonly labelled “Earth’s Energy Budget” — energy in/energy out — but it doesn’t seem to be dominate in the ongoing climate controversy.  The latest paper shows that we can still cannot directly measure instantaneous radiative forcing.  “This fundamental metric has not been directly observed globally and previous estimates have come from models.  In part, this is because current space-based instruments cannot distinguish the instantaneous radiative forcing from the climate’s radiative response.”  It is possible that future satellite missions will be able to measure directly and accurately Earth’s incoming and outgoing energy.

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climate-debate

Nothing Alarming: Europe Data Show No Upward Trend In Droughts And Forest Fires

by P. Gosselin, Aug 24, 2022 in NoTricksZone

German online NOVO-Argumente looks at the forest fire situation in Germany and Europe.

Currently parts of Europe are experiencing severe drought conditions and forest fires are raging in Germany. Climate activists and the mainstream are claiming it’s climate change, and it’s unprecedented.

But NOVO-Argumente looks at the historical data going back decades and finds nothing alarming.

Over the long-term average (1993 to 2019), 1035 forest fires in Germany were recorded with an average of 656 hectares affected. The amount of damage is just 1.38 million euros. Forest fires therefore cost us about as much per year as we spend every 30 minutes on subsidizing solar and wind energy.

“No evidence of an increase in forest fires”

As the following graph shows, there is no evidence of an increase in forest fires over the last 30 years in terms of number and extent. The peaks are not seen in this chart from the Federal Environmental Agency because they are in the past. In 1975, over 8000 hectares burned in Lower Saxony alone. In contrast, in the year 2021, which is not yet recorded in the graph, there were only 548 forest fires in the whole of Germany on a total area of 148 hectares.

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climate-debate

Welfare in the 21st century: Increasing development, reducing inequality, the impact of climate change, and the cost of climate policies

by B. Lomborg, July 2020 in TechForecSocChange

Abstract

Climate change is real and its impacts are mostly negative, but common portrayals of devastation are unfounded. Scenarios set out under the UN Climate Panel (IPCC) show human welfare will likely increase to 450% of today’s welfare over the 21st century. Climate damages will reduce this welfare increase to 434%.

Arguments for devastation typically claim that extreme weather (like droughts, floods, wildfires, and hurricanes) is already worsening because of climate change. This is mostly misleading and inconsistent with the IPCC literature. For instance, the IPCC finds no trend for global hurricane frequency and has low confidence in attribution of changes to human activity, while the US has not seen an increase in landfalling hurricanes since 1900. Global death risk from extreme weather has declined 99% over 100 years and global costs have declined 26% over the last 28 years.

Arguments for devastation typically ignore adaptation, which will reduce vulnerability dramatically. While climate research suggests that fewer but stronger future hurricanes will increase damages, this effect will be countered by richer and more resilient societies. Global cost of hurricanes will likely decline from 0.04% of GDP today to 0.02% in 2100.

Climate-economic research shows that the total cost from untreated climate change is negative but moderate, likely equivalent to a 3.6% reduction in total GDP.

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better to know...?

Climate Change Saves More Lives Than You’d Think

by Bjorn Lomborg, Sept16, 2021 in WSJ

Global warming does cause more heat deaths, but the editors’ statistic is deceptive. They say global heat deaths have gone up by 54% among old people in the past 20 years, but they fail to mention that the number of old people has risen by almost as much. Demographics drove most of the rise, not climate change.

They also leave out that climate change has saved more lives from temperature-related deaths than it has taken. Heat deaths make up about 1% of global fatalities a year—almost 600,000 deaths—but cold kills eight times as many people, totaling 4.5 million deaths annually. As temperatures have risen since 2000, heat deaths have increased 0.21%, while cold deaths have dropped 0.51%. Today about 116,000 more people die from heat each year, but 283,000 fewer die from cold. Global warming now prevents more than 166,000 temperature-related fatalities annually.

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better to know...?, energy and fields

U.S. Petroleum Reserves Hit Lowest Level In Decades Ahead Of Winter Months

by B. Ziesloft, Aug 19, 2022 in DailyWire

Strategic Petroleum Reserve levels have reached their lowest levels in four decades as autumn and winter weather conditions approach, according to data from the Energy Information Administration.

President Joe Biden has responded to rising gas prices by releasing one million barrels of oil per day from the Strategic Petroleum Reserves — a stock of emergency crude oil created to “reduce the impact of disruptions in supplies of petroleum products.” Though reserves in January 2021 were as high as 638 million barrels, reserves have fallen to 461 million barrels as of August 2022 — a level not seen since March.

The national average price of gasoline was $2.38 per gallon when President Joe Biden assumed office, according to the Energy Information Administration, and increased to $3.53 per gallon by the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Prices surpassed $5.00 per gallon in early June before subsiding to $3.92 per gallon as of Friday, according to AAA.

Biden nixed an expansion of the Keystone XL Pipeline upon his entrance into office. Yet the commander-in-chief has repeatedly cast the actions of Russian President Vladimir Putin as the main factor behind soaring energy costs.

“Putin’s Price Hike hit hard in May here and around the world: high gas prices at the pump, energy, and food prices accounted for around half of the monthly price increases, and gas pump prices are up by $2 a gallon in many places since Russian troops began to threaten Ukraine,” Biden said in a June statement. “Even as we continue our work to defend freedom in Ukraine, we must do more — and quickly — to get prices down here in the United States.”

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better to know...?, climate-debate

1,200 Scientists, Scholars Declare: ‘There Is No Climate Emergency’

by F. Bergman, Aug 19, 2022 in Slay

A group of almost 1200 of the world’s leading scientists and scholars has signed a document to declare that “there is no climate emergency.”

The group, led by a Nobel Prize laureate, signed the declaration that states climate science is based more on personal beliefs and political agendas than rigorous scientific facts.

The World Climate Declaration warns that climate science “should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific.”

“Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures,” the declaration reads.

According to a report by WND, the declaration was organized by Climate Intelligence.

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