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.
by P. Driessen, Oct 10, 2022 in ClimateChangeDispatch
Hurricane Ian is in the history books, having unleashed its Category 4 fury on southwestern Florida.
Even as the area slowly digs out and rebuilds, the devastation and tragedies will linger in reality and memories.
Ian was the latest of 123 hurricanes to hit the Sunshine State since official recordkeeping began in 1851. But unsurprisingly, some wasted no time trying to link Ian to the most dominant issue of our time. [bold, links added]
Ian should have “finally ended” the debate about “whether there’s climate change,” President Biden stated, as he assessed damage along Florida’s Gulf Coast with Governor and First Lady DeSantis.
The newest fearmongering is slightly more sophisticated. Now hurricanes are gaining strength more rapidly because of fossil fuels. The phenomenon even has a fancy name: “rapid intensification.”
This clever claim cannot be proven or disproven, because we didn’t have technologies to measure how rapidly certain storms intensified even a few decades ago.
A major survey into the accuracy of climate models has found that almost all the past temperature forecasts between 1980-2021 were excessive compared with accurate satellite measurements. The findings were recently published by Professor Nicola Scafetta, a physicist from the University of Naples. He attributes the inaccuracies to a limited understanding of Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS), the number of degrees centigrade the Earth’s temperature will rise with a doubling of carbon dioxide.
Scientists have spent decades trying to find an accurate ECS number, to no avail. Current estimates range from 0.5°C to around 6-7°C. Without knowing this vital figure, the so-called ‘settled’ science narrative around human-caused climate change remains a largely political invention, not a credible scientific proposition. Professor Scafetta has conducted extensive work into climate models and is a long-time critic of their results and forecasts. In a previous work, he said many of the climate models should be “dismissed and not used by policymakers”. Along with around 250 professors, he is a signatory to the World Climate Declaration which states there is no climate emergency and also notes climate models are “not remotely plausible as global tools”.
Scafetta’s latest work grouped 38 major climate models into low, medium and high ECS values, ranging between 1.8°C and 5.7°C. He found that models in the medium and high category “ran hot” in over 95% and 97% of cases respectively. The lower models were said to have done better when compared to global warming calculated for the period by the major surface datasets of 0.52-0.58°C. But the UAH satellite data showed warming up to 30% less during this period, suggesting even the low warming models produced “excessive warming” from 1980-2021.
According to Scafetta, these results are showed that the ECS figure could be as low as 1.2-2°C. Particular concern is expressed about surface temperature records that “appear to be severely affected by non-climatic warming biases”. Scafetta concludes that surface-based temperature records are likely to be affected by warming biases, such as the urban heat island effect due to expanding urban development, and subject to natural oscillations that are not reproduced by climate models. He concludes: “The global warming expected for the next few decades may be even more moderate than predicted by the low ECS-GCMs [Global Circulation Models], and could easily fall within a safe temperature range where climate adaptation policies will suffice.”
The United Nations revealed that they “own the science” of climate change and they have manipulated Google search results to suppress any climate view that deviates from UN claims. Melissa Fleming, the Under-Secretary for Global Communications at the United Nations made the remarks at a World Economic Forum ‘Tackling Disinformation’ event on September 29, 2022 titled “Sustainable Development Impact Meetings 2022.”
Melissa Fleming: (Full Video) “We partnered with Google. For example, if you Google ‘climate change,’ you will, at the top of your search, you will get all kinds of UN resources. We started this partnership when we were shocked to see that when we Googled ‘climate change,’ we were getting incredibly distorted information right at the top. So we’re becoming much more proactive. We own the science, and we think that the world should know it, and the platforms themselves also do. But again, it’s a huge, huge challenge that I think all sectors of society need to be very active in.” (Full transcript here)
As I wrote in my book, The Great Reset, “the public health bureaucracy and the ‘climate community’ have become political lobbying organizations, and they are using ‘The Science’ to support their preferred policies—policies that dovetail with the Great Reset and advance the power of the administrative state.”
by P. Homewood, Oct 8, 2022 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
We looked at the Arctic sea ice minimum for this year a couple of weeks ago. But the average for September as a whole is much more relevant.
In fact it shows very similar results this year, with average September extent slightly below last year, but otherwise the highest since 2014, and also much greater than in 2007:
Note the grossly misleading trend line, loved by all Arctic alarmists! Their trend cannot conceal the fact that the ice extent stopped declining in 2007.
The ice could remain stable for the next century, but DMI’s overall trend line would still show a long term decline decline.
The New Pause, having paused a month ago, has now lengthened again: this time to exactly eight years. As always, the Pause is calculated as the longest period for which the least-squares linear-regression trend up to the most recent month for which the UAH global mean surface temperature anomaly is available is zero.
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The trend on the entire dataset during the 526 months from December 1978 to September 2022 is 0.95 C°, equivalent to only 1.34 C°/century. So slow a rate of warming is well within the natural variability of the climate, and is proving net-beneficial.
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The New Pause has grown to fully eight years in length at a most embarrassing point for true-believers: for the cost to the West of the economically suicidal policies that they have long advocated is now becoming all too painfully apparent, just as it is also ever more evident that the warming since 1990 is well below half the midrange prediction made by IPCC that year.
SEPTEMBER 30, 2022 Advances in technology led to record new well productivity in the Permian Basin in 2021
The Permian Basin in western Texas and eastern New Mexico is one of the world’s most prolific unconventional oil- and natural gas-producing regions. The Permian Basin has become more productive because of the technological advancements in drilling and completion techniques, which allow operators to economically extract hydrocarbons from the low permeability reservoirs.
The stacked reservoirs of the Permian Basin, and the Delaware and Midland subbasins within it, vary in thickness and depth. Improved geological understanding, known as subsurface delineation, helps operators place wells to optimize well spacing in the most productive areas.
The Permian Basin has produced oil and associated natural gas from vertical wells for decades. Since 2010, advances in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling led to rapid production growth. The number of new horizontal wells increased to 4,524 in 2021, compared with 350 in 2010. In June 2022, the Permian Basin accounted for about 43% of U.S. crude oil production and 17% of U.S. natural gas production (measured as gross withdrawals).
The length of a well’s horizontal section, or lateral, is a key factor in well productivity. In the Permian Basin, average well horizontal length has increased to more than 10,000 feet in the first nine months of 2022, compared with less than 4,000 feet in 2010.
Over the last several weeks, many mainstream news media outlets have claimed that hurricanes are becoming more expensive, more frequent, and more intense because of climate change. [bold, links added]
• The Financial Timesreported that “hurricane frequency is on the rise.”
• The New York Timesclaimed, “strong storms are becoming more common in the Atlantic Ocean.”
• The Washington Postsaid, “climate change is rapidly fueling super hurricanes.”
• ABC Newsdeclared, “Here’s how climate change intensifies hurricanes.”
The increasing cost of hurricane damage can be explained entirely by more people and more property in harm’s way. Consider how much more developed Miami Beach is today compared to a century ago. Once you adjust for rising wealth, there is no trend of increasing damage.
“After adjusting for a likely undercount of hurricanes in the pre-satellite era,” writes NOAA, “there is essentially no long-term trend in hurricane counts. The evidence for an upward trend is even weaker if we look at U.S. landfalling hurricanes, which even show a slight negative trend beginning from 1900 or from the late 1800s.”
What’s more, NOAA expects a 25% decline in hurricane frequency in the future.
by P. Homewood, Oct 4, 2022 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
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Because the data is compiled from the same EM-DAT database, the annual number of deaths shows an uptick from the 1990s to the 2000s. It is clear though that disaster-related deaths from extreme weather have been falling since the 1920s and are now approaching zero. This is due as much to improved planning, more robust structures and early warning systems, as it is to diminishing numbers of natural disasters. And, as can be seen from the figure, it is earthquakes – entirely natural events – that have been the deadliest disasters over the last two decades.
Ignoring all the evidence, however, the press release accompanying the latest WMO report proclaims that “Climate science is clear: we are heading in the wrong direction,” the UN Secretary-General adding, with characteristic hype, that the report “shows climate impacts heading into uncharted territory of destruction.”
A more detailed discussion of the erroneous claims of both CRED and the WMO can be found in my two most recent reports on weather extremes (here and here).
There are four main reasons why Antarctica’s Larsen C Ice Shelf may be melting. None of them involve human forcing or CO2 concentration changes.
Scientists have recently completed an exhaustive 20-year study of the “most significant causes of melting” of the Larsen C Ice Shelf in the Antarctic Peninsula. They have concluded the 4 main surface melt drivers are:
1. Shortwave solar radiation.
2. Foehn wind variations.
3. Cloud cover changes.
4. Natural circulation variations (SAM, ENSO).
Neither anthropogenic forcing nor CO2 emissions are listed as causal factors in Antarctic ice melt processes.
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In other words, there is nothing even remotely unusual about any Antarctic ice melt or climate trends that cannot be explained by or attributed to natural, non-anthropogenic processes.
I won’t reprint the whole list, but it’s worth a read.
The list certainly is not all-inclusive. There are many more which could have been added, such as the 150 mph Indianola hurricane in 1886, and Carla in 1961, the 8th and 9th most intense hurricanes on record.
But the list gives a good impression of how catastrophic US hurricanes have always been.
The timeline I have prepared below just covers the period 1900 to 1969 and summarises just how frequent these disastrous hurricanes actually are.
Greenland’s climate changes are remarkably uncorrelated with climate model expectations and changes in atmospheric CO2.
When CO2 levels were in the mid-200s parts per million (11.7 to 4.5 thousand years ago) the Arctic and northern Greenland were 2-4°C warmer than now, ice margins were 80 km behind today’s, ice-free open water conditions prevailed, and Greenland warmed 10°C in just 60 years (Elnegaard Hansen et al., 2022).
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Past interglacial CO2 levels of only 280 ppm were associated with a “nearly ice free” Greenland and the presence of flora and fauna in subarctic terrestrial environments 1000 km northwards of where they can survive today, implying “at least 5°C higher temperatures” (Bennike and Böcher, 2021). Summer sea water temperatures were as much as “7-8°C higher than at present”.
With Hurricane Ian (now a tropical storm) exiting the east coast of Florida, there is no shortage of news reports tying this storm to climate change. Even if those claims actually include data to support their case, those data are usually for cherry-picked regions and time periods. If global warming is causing a change in tropical cyclone activity, it should show up in global statistics.
The latest peer-reviewed study (March 2022, here) of the accumulated wind energy in tropical cyclones since 1990 (when we started have sufficient global data) showed a decrease in hurricane activity. There was an increase in Atlantic activity, but this was matched by an even larger decrease in Pacific activity, due to a shift from El Nino to La Nina conditions during that time.
So, yes, there is climate change involved in the uptick in Atlantic activity in recent decades. But it’s natural.
Looking at just the numbers of global hurricanes since 1980, we see no obvious trends.
The so-called hiatus in global annual average temperature between 2002 – 2014, once controversial to some but now well-established in the peer-reviewed literature, ended in 2014 with the start of a series of record-breaking El Nino events that spiked global temperature with a subsequent fall-back. Now a new study into the effect of man-made aerosol pollution adds to likely reasons for the end of the hiatus, and may point to lower estimates for future global warming.
An international research team writing in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, uses satellite data to show that concentrations of aerosol particles have decreased significantly since 2000. This is good news as cleaner air benefits health, but it also reduces particles’ which have a cooling effect on the terrestrial climate.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), by 2019 the global temperature had risen by 1.1 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels due to increasing greenhouse gasses from burning fossil fuels. At the same time the combustion of fossil fuels emit aerosols which cool our climate by reflecting sunlight and increasing the reflectivity of clouds.
Professor Johannes Quaas, a meteorologist at Leipzig University, and colleagues from Europe, China, and the US have published robust observational evidence of significant reduction of aerosol pollution and improved global air quality.
Sky News host Andrew Bolt says doubting climate change has become a “mental condition.”
Mr. Bolt says a study of 390 people by psychologist Dr. Rachael Sharman shows those who “suffer from this disorder” of not believing climate change are typically older, conservative, and have “lower environmental values.” [bold, links added]
“Sharman does admit to one thing she got wrong: she says she didn’t expect this,” he said.
“Says it’s contrary to our predictions, but, oh, people with high analytical abilities were even more likely to be skeptical.”
Mr. Bolt said Dr. Sharman did not question why “people who are great at analyzing things are more skeptical of global warming preachers.”
by K. Richard, Apr 9, 2021 in ClimateChangeDispatch
A new peer-reviewed paper published in the International Journal of Global Warmingidentifies 79 “apocalyptic” predictions formulated since 1970 by “researchers and activists” who “predict cataclysmic events” resulting from “catastrophic climate change.”
Already 48 of these “truly apocalyptic forecasts” have failed. The other 31 are likely just as wrong, but the prediction end dates haven’t expired yet, as “the apocalypse is always about 20 years out.”
Rode and Fischbeck are “professors of Social & Decision Sciences and Engineering & Public Policy” at Carnegie Mellon University.
In a new paper and press release (surprisingly published in AAAS) they have effectively exposed a “string of repeated apocalyptic forecast failures” over the last 50 years made by such activists/scientists as Al Gore, Paul Ehrlich, and Tim Flannery.
Activists/scientists James Hansen and Michael Mann have catastrophic predictions set to expire in the 2030s, and the IPCC had a cataclysmic forecast already fail and 3 others that will expire in 2029 and 2050 (2).
The authors’ intention was to warn the climate science community about the cry-wolf dangers of repeatedly making “extreme climate forecasts” that, when they inevitably fail, “undermine the trust in the underlying science.”
It is highly likely that these warnings will be ignored, however, as “making sensational predictions of the doom of humanity, while scientifically dubious, has still proven tempting for those wishing to grab headlines.”
Three distinct phases of climate variability in eastern Africa coincided with shifts in hominin evolution and dispersal over the last 620,000 years, an analysis of environmental proxies from a lake sediment record has revealed. The project explores the youngest chapter in human evolution by analysing lacustrine sediments in close vicinity to paleo-anthropological key sites in eastern Africa using scientific deep drilling. The research endeavour included more than 22 researchers from 19 institutions in 6 countries, and was led by Dr Verena Foerster at the University of Cologne’s Institute of Geography Education. The article ‘Pleistocene climate variability in eastern Africa influenced hominin evolution’ has now appeared in Nature Geoscience.
Despite more than half a century of hominin fossil discoveries in eastern Africa, the regional environmental context of the evolution and dispersal of modern humans and their ancestors is not well established. Particularly for the Pleistocene (or Ice Age) between 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, there are no continuous high-resolution paleo-environmental records available for the African continent.
The research team extracted two continuous 280-metre sediment cores from the Chew Bahir Basin in southern Ethiopia, an area where early humans lived and developed during the Pleistocene. Chew Bahir is very remotely situated in a deep tectonic basement in close vicinity to the Turkana area and the Omo-Kibish, key paleo-anthropological and archaeological sites. The cores yielded the most complete record for such a long period ever extracted in the area, revealing how different climates influenced the biological and cultural transformation of humans inhabiting the region.
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Journal Reference:
Verena Foerster, Asfawossen Asrat, Christopher Bronk Ramsey, Erik T. Brown, Melissa S. Chapot, Alan Deino, Walter Duesing, Matthew Grove, Annette Hahn, Annett Junginger, Stefanie Kaboth-Bahr, Christine S. Lane, Stephan Opitz, Anders Noren, Helen M. Roberts, Mona Stockhecke, Ralph Tiedemann, Céline M. Vidal, Ralf Vogelsang, Andrew S. Cohen, Henry F. Lamb, Frank Schaebitz & Martin H. Trauth. Pleistocene climate variability in eastern Africa influenced hominin evolution. Nature Geoscience, 2022 DOI: 10.1038/s41561-022-01032-y
by P. Homewood, Sep 26, 202 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
I wonder how these predictions worked out? (Answers tomorrow!!)
Scientists in the US have presented one of the most dramatic forecasts yet for the disappearance of Arctic sea ice.
Their latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.
Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told an American Geophysical Union meeting that previous projections had underestimated the processes now driving ice loss.
Summer melting this year reduced the ice cover to 4.13 million sq km, the smallest ever extent in modern times.
Remarkably, this stunning low point was not even incorporated into the model runs of Professor Maslowski and his team, which used data sets from 1979 to 2004 to constrain their future projections. “Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007,” the researcher from the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, explained to the BBC.
“So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative.”
Since debuting on Substack in the spring of 2021, Doomberg — an anonymous group of writers whose avatar is a distinctive green chicken — has become one of the most popular financial publications on the site. The team has also become a prominent and distinctive voice on finance Twitter (a.k.a. FinTwit). Doomberg’s writers, who come from the world of commodities and heavy industry, deliver deeply informed, often withering analysis that focuses largely on energy policy, their area of expertise. Befitting the site’s name, they often take a darker (or perhaps just more realistic) view than many mainstream sources. Doomberg has been particularly bearish — and prescient — about the unfolding energy crisis in Europe, warning for months that the decision by European leaders to cut off Vladimir Putin from their markets after his invasion of Ukraine risked causing an economic crisis. I spoke via Zoom with one of the Doomberg writers (as represented by that green chicken) about how Russia’s oil industry has thrived despite sanctions, where Europe’s energy squeeze is headed, and why his site is, despite appearances, fundamentally optimistic.
We have digitized the Polar Portal’s graph of the accumulated surface mass balance and have come up with a value of 467 Gt. That’s 100 Gt or 27% above the 1981…2010 mean! Together with the melting of icebergs (assuming the value of the previous year, which was already 10% more than that of 2020 ) this results in approximately the representation below, which was included in the publication until the report 2020.
In 2021, one has probably omitted for reasons, perhaps the jump was difficult to explain by the calving of icebergs?
The total mass balance is very likely -100 Gt. An “accelerated” thawing of the Greenland ice sheet is not to be recognized. If one accumulates the mass loss, one sees the “braking” very nicely. Acceleration occurred until 2012.
The so-called hiatus in global annual average temperature between 2002 – 2014, once controversial to some but now well-established in the peer-reviewed literature, ended in 2014 with the start of a series of record-breaking El Nino events that spiked global temperature with a subsequent fall-back. Now a new study into the effect of man-made aerosol pollution adds to likely reasons for the end of the hiatus, and may point to lower estimates for future global warming.
An international research team writing in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, uses satellite data to show that concentrations of aerosol particles have decreased significantly since 2000. This is good news as cleaner air benefits health, but it also reduces particles’ which have a cooling effect on the terrestrial climate.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), by 2019 the global temperature had risen by 1.1 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels due to increasing greenhouse gasses from burning fossil fuels. At the same time the combustion of fossil fuels emit aerosols which cool our climate by reflecting sunlight and increasing the reflectivity of clouds.
Professor Johannes Quaas, a meteorologist at Leipzig University, and colleagues from Europe, China, and the US have published robust observational evidence of significant reduction of aerosol pollution and improved global air quality.
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When taken together with a couple of super-strong El Nino events which temporarily drove up global temperature (see graph below), the new findings suggest that the global warming hiatus — clearly evident prior to 2014 — may not have ended yet. If NASA’s satellite data are confirmed, it would suggest that much of the very moderate changes in global temperature this century may have been driven primarily by cleaner air and naturally-occurring El Ninos.
Global temperature changes 2000-2022. Source: Met Office/HadCRUT5…
Amidst the European energy crisis, it’s easy to miss other events that are of significance to the discussion about the climate-change movement.
Among them are a series of setbacks to green policies in China and India.
These countries — representing three billion people — have delayed implementation of renewable energy commitments and aggressively increased the production and consumption of fossil fuels.
At the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, Chinese and Indian leaders — along with their counterparts from Russia and Turkey — explicitly declared that they cannot be coerced into reducing fossil fuel consumption, calling for an “increased investment in oil and gas production and exploration.”
As usual, the mainstream media neither published this news in headlines nor discussed how the proliferation of fossil fuels in these countries make the so-called net zero measures in the West irrelevant to the objectives of climate alarmists.
As the world’s second biggest coal user and home to 1.3 billion people, India has deemphasized its commitment to transitioning to renewable energy.
According to reports, the country fell significantly short of its solar-installation targets, jeopardizing its overall transition goals.
India’s Economic Times reported that at least 25 gigawatts (GW) of solar power projects that were expected to be operational or nearly complete faced delays or uncertainties.
The deferrals of solar installations now make it impossible to attain the planned addition of 450 GW in renewable capacity by 2030.
The Times says India “added 10 GW of solar capacity in 2021, while it needs to add close to 30 GW every year to be able to meet the target.”
The National Solar Mission — India’s internationally renowned solar energy strategy — is in disarray, with only half its promised capacity in place.
India considers coal plants an integral part of its energy sector.
by P. Homewood, Sep 23, 2022 in ClimateChangeDispatch
For years the ‘experts’ have been telling us that the Arctic would soon be ice-free in summer.
Al Gore notoriously warned us in 2009 that ‘there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.’
He was, of course, just a politician. But a whole host of supposed Arctic scientists were all busy issuing similar warnings at the time. [bold, links added]
In 2007, for instance, Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told us that northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just five to six years.
In December of that year, Jay Zwally of Nasa agreed, giving the ice till 2012. A year later, in 2008 Professor David Barber went one step further, saying the ice would all be gone that very summer.
For sheer persistence in getting it wrong, however, the prize must go to Peter Wadhams, professor and head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge:
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• In 2012, he predicted that the Arctic would be ice-free by 2015/16.
• In 2014, he thought it might last till 2020.
• In 2016, he confidently predicted the Arctic would be ice-free that summer (though curiously he now defined ‘ice-free’ as less than 1 million square kilometers).
“On the other hand, I think I can safely say that nobody understands climate change.” J. Vinós, paraphrasing Richard Feynman’s words about quantum mechanics.
7.1 Introduction
This plain-language summary has been written at the request of some readers of our series of articles on the Winter Gatekeeper hypothesis:
Climate is extremely complex, and people, including scientists, have a natural tendency to look for simple explanations. The Occam’s Razor principle is a good first approach but climate change cannot have a simple answer. Over the past seven years, one of the authors of this series (JV) has been laboriously reading many thousands of scientific articles and analyzing hundreds of climate datasets trying to understand how Earth’s climate changes naturally. This is a first step to understanding the human impact on climate change. The outcome of this work is the book “Climate of the Past, Present and Future.” It is a graduate-student level academic book that discusses many controversial issues about natural climate change over the past 800,000 years. In this book, a new hypothesis on natural climate change is presented. It relates changes in the strength of the meridional (poleward) transport of energy with climatic changes that have taken place, both in the past and recently.
New research continues to document non-warming and even “robust cooling” trends for entire regions of the Southern Hemisphere in recent decades.
Land surface temperature data compilations from the Southern Hemisphere (South America, Southwestern Andes, Tasmania, New Zealand, Australia) indicate that any warming during the 20th century occurred before 1980, with no obvious net warming since (Rezsöhazy et al., 2022).
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Sea surface temperature data from the Southeastern Indian Ocean, Tasman Sea, and Great Barrier Reef region indicate no net warming since 1982 (Chapman et al., 2022).
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A 2021 study reported a profound cooling trend for most of Antarctica in recent decades, with amplitudes of -2.8°C for East Antarctica and -1.68°C for West Antarctica during 1979-2018.
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La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse
