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.
climate and geology

Well-preserved fossils could be consequence of past global climate change

by C. Rotter, Mar 9, 2022 in WUWT

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

Lead researcher in the labIMAGE: LEAD AUTHOR SINJINI SINHA, A GRADUATE STUDENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN’S JACKSON SCHOOL OF GEOSCIENCES, EXAMINES IMAGES OF FOSSIL SPECIMENS IN THE SCANNING ELECTRON MICROSCOPE LAB. SINHA USED THE MICROSCOPE TO EXAMINE EXCEPTIONALLY PRESERVED FOSSILS AND LEARN MORE ABOUT THE FOSSILIZATION PROCESS. view more 
CREDIT: THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN/JACKSON SCHOOL OF GEOSCIENCES.
Climate change can affect life on Earth. According to new research, it can also affect the dead.
A study of exceptionally preserved fossils led by a graduate student at The University of Texas at Austin has found that rising global temperatures and a rapidly changing climate 183 million years ago may have created fossilization conditions in the world’s oceans that helped preserve the soft and delicate bodies of deceased marine animals.
The fossils include squid-like vampyropods with ink sacs, ornate crustacean claws and fish with intact gills and eye tissue.
Despite being from different locations and marine environments, the fossils were all preserved in a similar manner. Geochemical analysis revealed that the conditions needed to preserve such captivating fossils could be connected to Earth’s climate.
“When I started the research, I had no idea if they would preserve the same way or a different way,” said lead author Sinjini Sinha, a graduate student at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences. “I was curious what led to the exceptional preservation.”
The research was published in Scientific Reports.

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climate-debate

New Study Suggests The Early Holocene’s Baltic Sea Temperatures Were 5-11°C Warmer Than Present

by Weiss et al., 2022 in NoTricksZone

Baltic Sea surface temperatures may have reached 24°C 7,200 years ago compared to the current 12.7°C.

A new study (Weiss et al., 2022) indicates Baltic Sea regional surface temperatures ranged between 21-24°C from ~5.7 to 7.7 ka (thousand years ago). This period is referred to as the Baltic’s Holocene Thermal Maximum.

Temperatures dipped to 17.2°C at 1.373 ka. (The time span ranging from 0.0 ka to 3 ka is referred to in the study as the Modern Baltic, or M.B.)

The current (0.0 ka) surface temperature for the Baltic S is 12.7°C. This temperature is more than 11°C colder than the Baltic’s temperatures at 7.2 ka.

better to know...?, climate-debate

German Paper: “A Mild Additional Temperature Rise Of Around 1°K”… Drop Not Excluded By 2100!

by P. Gosselin, Mar 6, 2022 in NoTricksZone

In its most recent video, German site Die kalte Sonne here looks at a paper on CO2 climate forcing by Stefani 2021: Solar and Anthropogenic Influences on Climate: Regression Analysis and Tentative Predictions. The results point to only a moderately warming planet up to the year 2150.

To hype up climate warming alarm, IPCC scientists like to exaggerate CO2’s power to trap heat and warm up the atmosphere. But with every assessment report that the IPCC issues, the estimated value by which CO2 warms the planet steadily gets reduced as the observed warming keeps lagging behind what earlier models predicted.

In his paper, Frank Stefani and his team at the Helmholtz Center, Institute of Fluid Dynamics in Dresden, Germany looked at the impacts by CO2 and solar activity.

On average 1.1°C warming

Using double regression, the scientists evaluated linear combinations of the logarithm of the carbon dioxide concentration and the geomagnetic aa index as a proxy for solar activity. They reproduced the sea surface temperature (HadSST) since the middle of the 19th and ended up with a a climate sensitivity (of TCR type) in the range of 0.6 K until 1.6 K per doubling of CO2. The midpoint of this range is 1.1°C, a value many critical climate scientists have already estimated earlier, and thus far below the IPCC scary estimates.

The paper’s abstract elaborates further:

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better to know...?, energy and fields, Fracking

How Nuclear Power And Fracking Can Make Europe Energy Independent

by Bjorn Lomborg, Mar 7, 2022 in ClimateChangeDispatch

The devastating Russian invasion of Ukraine has captured global attention. While the world’s focus is rightly on the human toll and suffering, the crisis has highlighted the need to end reliance on Russian oil and gas. [bold, links added]

To achieve that ambition, we must be pragmatic and invest in sensible alternatives, not engage in wishful thinking about renewable energy.

Every single day, the world spends more than a billion dollarson fossil fuels from Russia, according to Bloomberg reporting.

As Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted, that money is now paying for the “murder of Ukrainian men, women, and children.” We must end this reliance.

However, this has proved to be easier said than done: Over dozens of years, the world has exchanged trillions of dollars for fossil fuels from the Soviet Union and now from Russia. Our continued use of Kremlin-backed oil and gas reveals two inconvenient truths.

First, reliable energy maintains the foundation of modern society and few are willing to give up its benefits. Access to cheap, abundant, and dependable energy has been the cornerstone of the industrial revolution and humanity’s achievements.

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energy and fields

FRACK TO THE FUTURE UK is sitting on gas gold mine which would blitz bills & Putin monopoly – so it’s madness not to frack, says Matt Ridley

by P. Homewood, Mar 3, 2022 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

THE price of gas is through the roof thanks to Vladimir Putin, who has Europe’s energy market by the throat.

Britain is on track to spend a staggering £2BILLION on imported liquefied natural gas from Russia this year as war rages in Ukraine.

Household bills will skyrocket even more than they already were — and could hit £3,000 a year.

This is what happens when you rely on imported foreign energy.

And what makes it more maddening is that we don’t need to do this. We have supplies here.

Under Lancashire and Yorkshire lies one of the best reservoirs of natural gas in the world, known as the Bowland Shale.

At current prices, just ten per cent of this gas is worth several trillion pounds and could keep Britain supplied with gas for five decades.

energy and fields

The renewable energy policy Paradox

by J. Blazquez et al., Feb 2018 in ScienceDirect

Abstract

One major avenue for policymakers to meet climate targets is by decarbonizing the power sector, one component of which is raising the share of renewable energy sources (renewables) in electricity generation.

However, promoting renewables –in liberalized power markets– creates a paradox in that successful penetration of renewables could fall victim to its own success. With the current market architecture, future deployment of renewable energy will necessarily be more costly and less scalable. Moreover, transition towards a full 100% renewable electricity sector is unattainable. Paradoxically, in order for renewable technologies to continue growing their market share, they need to co-exist with fossil fuel technologies. Ignoring these findings can slow adoption and increase the costs of deploying new renewable technologies.

This paper spots the incompatibility between electricity liberalization and renewable policy, regardless of the country, location or renewable technologies. The Paradox holds as long as market clear prices with short term marginal costs, and renewable technology’s marginal cost is close to zero and not dispatchable.

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better to know...?

The West’s Green Delusions Empowered Putin

by M. Shellenberg, Mar 1, 2022 in CommonSense

How has Vladimir Putin—a man ruling a country with an economy smaller than that of Texas, with an average life expectancy 10 years lower than that of France—managed to launch an unprovoked full-scale assault on Ukraine?

There is a deep psychological, political and almost civilizational answer to that question: He wants Ukraine to be part of Russia more than the West wants it to be free. He is willing to risk tremendous loss of life and treasure to get it. There are serious limits to how much the U.S. and Europe are willing to do militarily. And Putin knows it.

Missing from that explanation, though, is a story about material reality and basic economics—two things that Putin seems to understand far better than his counterparts in the free world and especially in Europe.

Putin knows that Europe produces 3.6 million barrels of oil a day but uses 15 million barrels of oil a day. Putin knows that Europe produces 230 billion cubic meters of natural gas a year but uses 560 billion cubic meters. He knows that Europe uses 950 million tons of coal a year but produces half that.

The former KGB agent knows Russia produces 11 million barrels of oil per day but only uses 3.4 million. He knows Russia now produces over 700 billion cubic meters of gas a year but only uses around 400 billion. Russia mines 800 million tons of coal each year but uses 300.

That’s how Russia ends up supplying about 20 percent of Europe’s oil, 40 percent of its gas, and 20 percent of its coal.

The math is simple. A child could do it.

The reason Europe didn’t have a muscular deterrent threat to prevent Russian aggression—and in fact prevented the U.S. from getting allies to do more—is that it needs Putin’s oil and gas.

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unclassified

Tokyo Sees Coldest February In 34 Years…Mean February Temperature Trend Has Not Risen Since 1987!

by P. Gosselin, Mar 4, 2022 in NoTricksZone

The February and winter 2021/22, untampered JMA mean temperature data are in for Tokyo and its Hachijojima island

Tokyo

Here’s the latest plot of February mean temperatures for Tokyo, since 1987

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Over the past 34 years, February mean temperatures in Tokyo have been steady, i.e. no warming. After the past 2 Februarys came in rather balmy, this most recent February has been the coldest since 1988!

Hachijojima

Moving away from the urban Tokyo and over to the city’s rural Pacific island of Hachijojima, some 275 km off the Japan mainland, we plot the latest February data going back to 1987

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Here as well there’s been no warming in February since 1987. In contradiction to the predictions of warming, the island has in fact cooled off bit, according to the data from the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA).

The past February has been among the coolest since 1987.

 

 

better to know...?, climate-debate

The Pause Lengthens Again: No Global Warming for 7 Years 5 Months

by C. Monckton of Brenchley, Mar 4, 2022 in WUWT

The drop from 0.03 K to 0.00 K from January to February 2022 in the UAH satellite monthly global mean lower-troposphere dataset has proven enough to lengthen the New Pause to 7 years 5 months, not that you will see this interesting fact anywhere in the Marxstream media

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better to know...?

On Global Warming, Journos Are Very Consistent: They Never Ask Questions

by J. Heller, Mar 2, 2022 in ClimateChangeDispatch

Another week and we get another dire report on the climate from the U.N. and again, there is no scientific data showing a direct link between oil use and temperatures, sea levels, and storm activity. [bold, links added]

What they have are computer models.

Here is what they are putting out now:

UN panel’s grim climate change report: ‘Parts of the planet will become uninhabitable’

Life in some locations on the planet is rapidly reaching the point where it will be too hot for the species that live there to survive, international climate experts said in a report Monday.

“With climate change, some parts of the planet will become uninhabitable,” said German scientist Hans-Otto Pörtner, co-chair of Working Group II for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which produced the report released in Berlin.

The report assesses scientific literature documenting the devastating effects of human-caused climate change on society and ecosystems worldwide.

And, as always, the media just reports these dire reports without asking any questions or doing any research. Five simple questions would be:

  1. Why have your previous predictions been 100% wrong?
  2. Why should we believe these predictions and base policies on these predictions when previous predictionshave been completely wrong?
  3. Shouldn’t policies be based on actual scientific data instead of computer models that can easily be manipulated to get the results you want?
  4. Should we destroy an industry based on computer models, especially one that has greatly improved the quality and length of life?
  5. Has the UN ever accomplished anything that indicates it can control the climate?

One prediction we continuously see to scare the public, especially the children, into compliance, is how many species of fossil fuels and humans are causing them to go extinct.

What we never see is actual data from the previous 150 years of fossil-fuel use that have gone extinct.

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climate-debate

UAH Global Temperature Update for February 2022 Was 0.00 deg. C

by Roy Spencer, Mar 2, 2022 in ClimateChangeDispatch

The Version 6.0 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for February 2022 was 0.00 deg. C, down a little from the January 2022 value of +0.03 deg. C.

The linear warming trend since January 1979 still stands at +0.13 C/decade (+0.12 C/decade over the global-averaged oceans, and +0.18 C/decade over global-averaged land).

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Pielke Jr. on IPCC AR6 WG2 Release

by Pielke Jr., Feb28, 2022 in WUWT

An initial thread on the IPCC AR6 WG2 report released today

Whereas WG1 received a mixed review in my areas of expertise (specifically: poor on scenarios, solid on extremes), my initial reaction to the WG2 report is that it is an exceedingly poor assessment

The first observation is that the report is more heavily weighted to implausible scenarios than any previous IPCC assessment report

In particular, RCP8.5 represents ~57% of scenario mentions

This alone accounts for the apocalyptic tone and conclusions throughout the report.

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better to know...?

IPCC WGII AR6, More Insanity: Small Islands

by K. Hansen, March 1, 2022 in WUWT

A Shocking Lack of Evidence for Shocking Claims

The IPCC has rushed out a new portion of the IPCC WGII Sixth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability.  The report itself and all of its summaries and chapters are available from the IPCC web site.  I say rushed out because when I downloaded Chapter 15: Small Islandsat 5:00 pm EST on February 28th, the copy I received was still marked “Accepted Version Subject to Final Edits” and “Do Not Cite, Quote or Distribute”.

They are quite right to mark it “Do Not Cite, Quote or Distribute”  —  I would have suggested expanding that to “Do Not Cite, Quote, Distribute, or Read”.   But, that would be a personal opinion.  I am afraid I failed to follow my own best advice and have made the mistake of reading Chapter 15:  Small Islands.  So, having failed to “not read” I will follow up by failing to not cite, quote or distribute potions in this Opinion essay.

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biology+acidification

The Decline Effect – Part 2: How Does This Happen?

by K. Hansen, Feb 29, 2022 in WUWT

What exactly is the decline effect?  Is it the fact that certain scientifically discovered effects decline over time the more they are studied and researched? Almost, but not really.  The Wiki has this definition for us:

“The decline effect may occur when scientific claims receive decreasing support over time. The term was first described by parapsychologist Joseph Banks Rhine in the 1930s to describe the disappearing of extrasensory perception (ESP) of psychic experiments conducted by Rhine over the course of study or time. In its more general term, Cronbach, in his review article of science “Beyond the two disciplines of scientific psychology” [ also .pdf here ] referred to the phenomenon as “generalizations decay.”[1] The term was once again used in a 2010 article by Jonah Lehrer published in The New Yorker.”

Some hold that the decline effect is not just a decrease of support over time but rather that it refers to a decrease in effect size over time – or, according to some, both because of one or the other.  That is, the support decreases because the effect sizes found decrease, or, because of decreasing support, reported effect sizes decrease.  The oft cited cause of the decline effect are: publication bias, citation bias, methodological bias, and investigator effects.  Part 1 of this series was an example of investigator effects.

Let’s be perfectly clear:  In no case does the decline effect refer to an actual decline in real world effects of some physical phenomena, but only to effect sizes found and/or reported in research reports over time.

One of the best discussions of the decline effect was published in The New Yorker over a decade ago.  In an article titled: “The Truth Wears Off — Is there something wrong with the scientific method?” by Jonah Lehrer.  At 2100 words, it is about a 10 minute read – and worth every minute.

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better to know...?, climate-debate, Fracking

How The Green Movement Empowered Putin’s Invasion Of Ukraine

by C. Feldman , Feb 2, 2022 in ClimateChageDispatch

Whatever you think our obligations to defend Ukraine at the moment, you must concede that the green movement in Western Europe and the United States made his actions possible. [bold, links added]

They also made any non-military reaction toothless and unpersuasive. It has been the equivalent of a poker player discarding a royal straight flush and then trying to bluff his opponents with the pair of deuces remaining in his hand.

Only with dumb opponents is he likely to take the pot. And Russian President Putin is definitely not dumb.

Indeed, the weak sanctions proposed by the West to induce the Russians to pull back were so unimpressive the Russian stock market, which has been collapsing, rose 6.5 percent after President Biden announced them.

Mr. Biden did follow Germany in not certifying Nord Stream 2, but that’s just a temporary, paper contract issue. It’s not a long-term or permanent shutdown. He basically hit a couple of banks tied to the Donbas region.

The GDP for the whole of Ukraine is about $160 billion, maybe. The GDP of Donbas is less than $6 billion and the GDP of Lugansk is $1 billion, also maybe. Delaware’s GDP, just to pick a random comparison, is $76 billion. So, to call Mr. Biden’s sanctions small beer is understating it.

And the reason he cannot actually do much more short of war is that he and the leaders of western Europe—bamboozled by the prospect of “climate change”—have made themselves poorer and weaker by eviscerating conventional fuel production.

While they without ample reason were discarding a very good hand, Russian president Putin was improving his by exploiting and selling to us and Europe his nations’ fossil fuels.

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climate-debate

The green dream goes lethal

by Melanie Phillips, Feb 24, 2022

There are many reasons why the west must bear considerable responsibility for this crisis. As I wrote here, these include the fantasy indulged in until this week by western nations that Putin posed no threat and was instead a person through whom westerners could enrich themselves.

Thus Britain’s capital has been dubbed “Londongrad,” because British governments have allowed so many of Putin’s fellow oligarchs to use its infrastructure to launder stolen Russian funds — contributing in the process so much to Britain’s GDP.

Then there’s the European embrace of pacifism, which has led Britain and other European states to cut their defence spending and rely instead on America’s protective umbrella which they all took for granted.

 

Storm damaged wind turbine, Ireland, 2008

That parasitic illusion went belly-up with the advent of the Biden administration, whose refusal to defend the free world and its preference instead to throw in the towel wherever possible  — as demonstrated most graphically by America’s disorderly scuttle from Afghanistan — has been duly noted by Putin, along with the regimes in China and Iran, as evidence that the Biden administration would take no effective action to counter their own aggression.

But even more shocking that all this is that, through their unhinged obsession with “climate change,” America, Britain and Europe have handed Putin his greatest weapon against them.

In their determination to reduce carbon emissions by turning against fossil fuels, and having put so many of their eggs in the basket of renewables which are desperately unreliable as national sources of energy, they have made themselves overly dependent on gas.

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climate and geology, climate-debate

Sinking Sea Level Alarmism: Study By Nevada Scientists Show Surface Motion of Continents “On Average Upward”

by P. Gosselin, Feb 27, 2022 in NoTricksZone

German climate science critical site Die kalte Sonne here reports on a recent study by Hammond et al (2021) titled:  “GPS Imaging of Global Vertical Land Motion for Studies of Sea Level Rise“.

better to know...?, climate-debate

How we have mischaracterized climate risk

by J. Curry, Feb 19, 2022 in ClimateEtc.

“The current thinking and approaches guiding this conceptualization and description have been shown to lack scientific rigour, the consequence being that climate change risk and uncertainties are poorly presented. The climate change field needs to strengthen its risk science basis, to improve the current situation.” – Norwegian risk scientist Terje Aven

For decision-makers, climate change is a problem in risk assessment and management.  Climate change is a risk because it may affect prosperity and security in a negative way, and because its consequences are uncertain.

Global climate change policy has been dominated by a specific strategy of risk management – the Precautionary Principle as a justification for setting specific targets for the elimination of manmade emissions of carbon dioxide.  In the early 1980s, the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) became bullish on the idea that fossil fuels would produce dangerous climate change. The prospect of eliminating fossil fuels was congruent with UNEP’s broader interests in environmental quality and world governance. At Villach in 1985 at the beginning of the climate treaty movement, the policy movement to eliminate fossil fuels became detached from any moorings in the science – the rhetoric of precaution argued that we should act anyway to eliminate fossil fuels, just in case. This perspective became codified by the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Treaty in 1992, the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.

Instead of framing the IPCC assessments around risk assessment, the IPCC reports narrowly framed its assessments to support the UNFCCC policies, focusing on dangerous climate change associated with fossil fuel emissions.  The torquing of climate science and the manufacture of a consensus around dangerous human-caused climate change not only oversimplified the scientific and social challenges, but led to the adoption of a “predict then act” strategy to manage and control, supporting decisions about elimination of fossil fuel emissions that were begun in the 1980’s.  The congruence of the IPCC assessments and UNFCCC policies enforces the belief that climate change is a simple or tame problem, with science trumping all practical questions and conflicting values and purposes.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Evaluation of the Homogenization Adjustments Applied to European Temperature Records in the Global Historical Climatology Network Dataset

by P. O’Neill et al., Feb 24, 2022 in MPDI

Abstract

The widely used Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) monthly temperature dataset is available in two formats—non-homogenized and homogenized. Since 2011, this homogenized dataset has been updated almost daily by applying the “Pairwise Homogenization Algorithm” (PHA) to the non-homogenized datasets. Previous studies found that the PHA can perform well at correcting synthetic time series when certain artificial biases are introduced. However, its performance with real world data has been less well studied. Therefore, the homogenized GHCN datasets (Version 3 and 4) were downloaded almost daily over a 10-year period (2011–2021) yielding 3689 different updates to the datasets. The different breakpoints identified were analyzed for a set of stations from 24 European countries for which station history metadata were available. A remarkable inconsistency in the identified breakpoints (and hence adjustments applied) was revealed. Of the adjustments applied for GHCN Version 4, 64% (61% for Version 3) were identified on less than 25% of runs, while only 16% of the adjustments (21% for Version 3) were identified consistently for more than 75% of the runs. The consistency of PHA adjustments improved when the breakpoints corresponded to documented station history metadata events. However, only 19% of the breakpoints (18% for Version 3) were associated with a documented event within 1 year, and 67% (69% for Version 3) were not associated with any documented event. Therefore, while the PHA remains a useful tool in the community’s homogenization toolbox, many of the PHA adjustments applied to the homogenized GHCN dataset may have been spurious. Using station metadata to assess the reliability of PHA adjustments might potentially help to identify some of these spurious adjustments. View Full-Text
Keywords: temperature homogenization; non-climatic biases; station metadata; climate change; European temperature changes
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SEE ALSO HERE : WUWT
SEE ALSO HERE : CERES
biology+acidification

The Decline Effect – Part 1: Ocean Acidification

by K. Hansen, Feb 22, 2022 in WUWT

There have been a couple of mentions of the decline effect over the past month, mostly prompted by a recent paper that appeared in  PLOS BIOLOGY  authored by Jeff Clements, Josefin Sundin, Timothy Clark, and Fredrik Jutfelt titled “Meta-analysis reveals an extreme “decline effect” in the impacts of ocean acidification on fish behavior”.

The subject matter of the paper, examining the decline effect in the field of Ocean Acidification (OA), particularly in studies on the effects of OA on fish behavior, is itself interesting.  I have written about OA and OA science many times here at WUWT.

There are two parts to this story about the decline effect.  1)  The specific case of the decline effect in OA studies claimed in the Clements et al. paper.   2)  The general case of the hypothesized causes of the decline effect in the sciences.

This essay will address the first issue:  the decline effect in OA studies.

The decline effect in OA science:

As for the specific OA case,  part of that story, featured in the Clements et al. paper,  has been well-covered by Steve Milloy at JunkScience in his article “Climate fish scare turns out to be just a fish story”.

There are several obvious potential causes of a decline effect in a field. They are: publication bias, citation bias, methodological bias, and investigator effects. 

As part of the review process of the new Clement et al. paper, each of those potential causes was investigated – and all but one were eliminated as a major cause.  It is that last cause that I write about today.

The missing parts in Steve Milloy’s coverage are something that I have written about before and is left under-said Clements et al. (2022):

First, you may recall that Timothy Clark (one of the co-authors of Clements (2022)) and others wrote a paper bluntly titled: “Ocean acidification does not impair the behaviour of coral reef fishes” published Nature in January 2020.

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climate-debate

Marshall Islands Growing, Not Shrinking. World Bank’s Embarrassing Error In Alarmist 2021 Report

by C. Rotter, Feb 21, 2022 in WUWT

Last October, just before Glasgow Climate Conference, the World Bank issued a report with a dire warning for the Marshall Islands. It claimed: “Rising sea levels in the atoll nation of Marshall Islands are projected to endanger 40 percent of existing buildings in the capital, Majuro, with 96 percent of the city at risk of frequent flooding induced by climate change.”

The startling claims were based on “new visual models” and that the rising sea levels were due to co2-induced warming.

But now we learn that the model inputs were garbage, and so the model outputs were garbage as well. Nothing of the sort is going to happen to the Marshall Islands anytime soon.

Analysis shows 4% growth from 1945 to 2010!

German climate site Die kalte Sonne here took a closer look at the dramatic claims and found the World Bank report had a grave error: they failed to account for the role that coral reefs play in island building.

A 2015 paper published by Ford et al indeed found that the opposite is happening: the islands are expanding and not sinking and shrinking. The paper’s abstract:

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biology+acidification

Most Published Studies Exaggerated the Effects of Ocean Acidification – and Covid, Etc.

by J. Marohasy’sBlog, Feb 20, 2022

The concept of ocean acidification, and human-caused global warming more generally, could be described as containing a grain of truth embedded in a mountain of nonsense. Indeed, the projected large increase in atmospheric CO2 will at most cause a small reduction in pH – it will not turn the ocean acidic. Yet this is what is implied by the term ocean acidification. True acidification would require average pH to be reduced below 7.0, at which point seashells would indeed begin to dissolve. This is an impossible scenario, however, because of the ocean’s effectively limitless buffering capacity.

There is a newly published study by Jeff Clements and team that concludes many of the published studies on ocean acidification, especially those studies published in high impact journals and accompanied by sensational media reporting, have turned-out to be wrong, or at least exaggerated.

My colleague Peter Ridd describes the situation:

This problem with exaggeration of threats applies to many areas of science and has a name: The Decline Effect.

The Decline Effect goes like this: an early report, usually attracting huge media interest, predicts some sort of catastrophe. But when follow up work is done, usually with far better experimental procedure and far greater numbers of samples, the original report turns out to be wrong.

Jeff Clements’ team included Timothy Clark, Josefin Sundin and Frederik Jutfelt who were involved in a study last year proving that numerous reports by James Cook University’s coral reef centres on reef fish was totally wrong.

I co-authored a book chapter with John Abbot some years ago that explained:

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climate-debate

British colonisation of Australia 250 years ago to blame for recent wildfires

by P. Homewood, Feb 18, 2022 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

Britain’s colonisation of Australia in the late 18th century is partly to blame for the nation’s recent ravaging by bushfires, a new study claims.

Before British ships carrying convicted criminals landed in New South Wales in January 1788, aboriginal people tended the landscape and were in charge of bushfire prevention.

But after the penal colony was established, and indigenous people were forced off their land and away from territories they had tended for centuries, the settlers took a new approach.

Suppression is now the primary focus. Instead of proactively and gradually reducing the risk of fire, authorities try to extinguish a fire as soon as possible after ignition.

Researchers from around the world, including Australia, have published a paper saying this change in tack has left Australia more vulnerable to wildfires now than it was 250 years ago.

“Indigenous people managed Australia’s flammable vegetation with “cultural burning” practices,” the study authors write in an article for The Conversation.

“These involved frequent, low-intensity fires which led to a fine-grained vegetation mosaic comprising grassy areas and scattered trees.

“Landscapes managed in this way were less prone to destructive fires. But under colonial rule, Aboriginal people were dispossessed of their lands and often prevented from carrying out many important practices.”

The change in wildfire prevention due to colonisation has left Australia more vulnerable to wildfires now than it was 250 years ago

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climate-debate

Dire Warnings Of A Climate Collapse By 2020 Made By Media In 2007 Get Postponed Again

by P. Gosselin, Feb 18, 2022 in NoTrickZone

In 2007, in the wake of the 4th IPCC report and Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, Germany’s most widely circulated daily, Bild, reported:

There are only 13 years left to save our earth! Can the climate catastrophe still be prevented? There is only little time left to save our planet!” According to the World Climate Report, mankind has at most until 2020 to prevent the worst by introducing efficient technologies.

As reported by the Financial Times Deutschland, UN climate researchers predict: “If greenhouse gas emissions do not decrease substantially by 2020, global warming will set in motion irreversible processes such as the melting of the ice sheets in Greenland and the acidification of the oceans.”

See original article (in German) here at Bild.

Since then, the horror scenarios obviously have not come to pass. Moreover, instead of greenhouse gases “substantially decreasing” globally, they’ve actually increased substantially.

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