Archives de catégorie : climate-debate

better to know...?, climate-debate

The New Pause Lengthens to 8 Years

by C. Monckton of Brenchley,  Oct 6, 2022 in WUWT

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.

 

climate-debate

The Media Are Deliberately Lying About Climate Change And Hurricanes

by M. Schellenberg, Oct 4, 2022 in ClimateChangeDispatch

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.”

• Both the FT and NY Times showed graphs purporting to show rising hurricane frequency using data from the U.S. government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

All those claims are false.

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.

Claims that hurricanes are becoming more frequent are similarly wrong.

“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.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Weather Disasters Wrongly Linked To Global Warming By Two International Agencies

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).

better to know...?, climate-debate

New Study Affirms Anthropogenic CO2 Emissions Play No Role In Larsen Ice Shelf Melt

by K. Richard, Oct 3, 2022 in NoTricksZone

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.

better to know...?, climate-debate

Notable US Hurricanes In History

by P. Homewood, Oct 1, 2022 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

Graphs only tell part of the story when it comes to hurricanes. They give the numbers, but don’t give much idea of the devastation they bring.

The National Hurricane Center has produced a list of some of the most notable hurricanes to hit the US:

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https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/outreach/history/#camille

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.

climate-debate

There Is No Detectable Link Between Greenland’s Climate And Atmospheric CO2 Changes

by K. Richard, Sep 29, 2022 in NoTricksZone

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”.

climate-debate

After Hurricane Ian: No Trend in Florida Landfalls, Global Activity Trending Down

by Dr R. Spencer, Sep 29, 2022 in WUWT

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.

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climate-debate

Global temperature hiatus may not have ended after all, new study suggests

by D. Whitehouse, Sep 23, 2022 in NetZeroWatch

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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climate-debate

Study: Climate Skeptics Tend To Have ‘High Analytical Abilities’

by A. Bolt, Sep 29, 2022 in ClimateChangeDispatch

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.”

“She says we’ve seen ‘predictions not becoming reality’ and ‘climate change alarmists’ predictions being completely false,” he said.

“Spot on.”

climate-debate

48 Of 79 ‘Catastrophic Climate’ Predictions Have Failed; Other 31 Haven’t Expired Yetrd,

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.”

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climate-debate

What Happened To The Ice-Free Arctic?

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.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7139797.stm

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.See also: The Ice Free Arctic – Part II

climate-debate

Trend Change? Greenland Ice Mass Loss Has Been Decelerating Since 2012

by P. Gosselin, Sep 24, 2022 in NoTricksZone

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.

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climate-debate

Global temperature hiatus may not have ended after all, new study suggests

by Dr D. Whitehouse, Sep 23, 2022 in NetZeroWatch

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
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climate-debate

The Climate Scaremongers: The Great Arctic Sea Ice Scam

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).

All these pronouncements were designed for political propaganda purposes, not for scientific reasons, and were widely propagated by the gullible media.

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climate-debate

The Winter Gatekeeper Hypothesis (VII). A summary plus Q&A

by J. Vinos and A. May, Sep 22, 2022 in ClimateEtc.

“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.

The book can be downloaded here (open access) Vinos-CPPF(2022)

climate-debate

How Can The Globe Be Warming When Most Of The Southern Hemisphere Isn’t?

by K. Richard, Sep 22, 2022 in NoTricksZone

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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climate-debate

Natural Oceanic Cycles Behind Heavy East Australia Rains, New Study Finds

by P. Gosselin, Sep 21, 2022 in WUWT/NTZ

East Australia got hit by lots of rain in February earlier this year, and the media of course blamed it all on manmade climate change.

Now a new study by Holgate et al (2022) titled “The Impact of Interacting Climate Modes on East Australian Precipitation Moisture Sources” shows East Australia’s rains are directly tied to natural oceanic patterns.

Hat-tip: EIKE.

The paper’s abstract summarizes that east Australia precipitation is driven by multiple interacting climate modes and that the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) modifies the supply of evaporative moisture for precipitation and that this is modulated by the Indian Ocean dipole (IOD) and southern annular mode (SAM).

Sources of moisture in eastern Australia. Source: Holgate et al, 2020…
better to know...?, climate-debate

Press Release: Important new paper challenges IPCC’s claims about climate sensitivity

by P. Homewood, Sep 20, 2022 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

London, 20 September – A new paper reduces the estimate of climate sensitivity – the amount of warming expected for a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations – by one third. The results therefore suggest that future global warming will be much less than expected.
The paper, by independent scientist Nic Lewis, has just appeared in the journal Climate Dynamics. It is an important challenge to the official view of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Lewis has critiqued a 2020 assessment of climate sensitivity by Sherwood et al., which strongly influenced the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, in 2021. Lewis commented:
“It is unfortunate that Sherwood et al.’s assessment of climate sensitivity, which underpinned the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, contained such serious errors, inconsistencies and deficiencies in its methods”.
After correcting the Sherwood et al. methods and revising key input data to reflect, primarily, more recent evidence, the central estimate for climate sensitivity comes down from 3.1°C per doubling of CO2 concentration in the original study to 2.16°C in the new paper.
This large reduction shows how sensitive climate sensitivity estimates still are to input assumptions, and that values between 1.5°C and 2°C remain quite plausible.

  • Climate sensitivity represents the long-term global temperature increase caused by a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration. There are different measures of climate sensitivity. Both the Sherwood and Lewis papers estimate the so-called ‘effective’ climate sensitivity, which reflects a new equilibrium state projected from centennial changes after a doubling of the CO2 concentration. This measure is considered the most relevant one for predicting climate change in the coming two centuries.
  • Climate sensitivity has always been a very important, but also highly uncertain, parameter in the climate change discourse. Earlier IPCC reports assessed its value as likely to be somewhere between 1.5°C and 4.5°C, with a best estimate of 3°C. However, prompted by the Sherwood paper, the 2021 Sixth Assessment Report moved that range upwards, to 2.5 to 4°C. Although for outsiders this might sound boring, for insiders it was a revolutionary change.
  • Lewis’s corrections and revisions lead to a likely range of 1.75 to 2.7°C, which is not only lower but is also much less uncertain than either the 2021 official IPCC assessment or the very similar Sherwood et al. estimate (2.6 to 3.9°C).
  • Nic Lewis is the lead or sole author of ten peer-reviewed papers on climate sensitivity. He was a participant in the 2015 workshop that kicked off the World Climate Research Programme project that led to the Sherwood et al. 2020 paper, but he was not a co-author of that paper.

Lewis commented:
“The substantial reduction in assessed climate sensitivity upon updating key input data suggests that the increase in the bottom of the climate sensitivity range in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report was unjustified”.
Lewis’s paper is entitled ‘Objectively combining climate sensitivity evidence’. It can be freely downloaded here. A detailed explanatory article about the paper is available here.

climate-debate

Climate Emergency Not Supported by Data, Say Four Leading Italian Scientists

by C. Morrison, Sep 14, 2022 in DailySkeptic

Four leading Italian scientists have undertaken a major review of historical climate trends and concluded that declaring a ‘climate emergency’ is not supported by the data. Reviewing data from a wide range of weather phenomena, they say a ‘climate crisis’ of the kind people are becoming alarmed about “is not evident yet”. The scientists suggest that rather than burdening our children with anxiety about climate change, we should encourage them to think about issues like energy, food and health, and the challenges in each area, with a more “objective and constructive spirit” and not waste limited resources on “costly and ineffective solutions”.

During the course of their work, the scientists found that rainfall intensity and frequency is stationary in many parts of the world. Tropical hurricanes and cyclones show little change over the long term, and the same is true of U.S. tornadoes. Other meteorological categories including natural disasters, floods, droughts and ecosystem productivity show no “clear positive trend of extreme events”. Regarding ecosystems, the scientists note a considerable “greening” of global plant biomass in recent decades caused by higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Satellite data show “greening” trends over most of the planet, increasing food yields and pushing back deserts.

The four scientists are all highly qualified and include physics adjunct professor Gianluca Alimonti, agrometeorologist Luigi Mariani and physics professors Franco Prodi and Renato Angelo Ricci. The last two are signatories to the rapidly growing ‘World Climate Declaration’. This petition states that there is no climate emergency and calls for climate science to be more scientific. It also calls for liberation from the “naïve belief in immature climate models”. In future, it says, “climate research must give significantly more emphasis to empirical science”.

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climate-debate

Climate Hysteria: A Mass Delusion To Demonize Carbon Dioxide

by J. Corsi, Sep 14 , 2022 in ClimateChangeDispartch

Climate hysterics like to throw around the world “denier” to castigate those who don’t get with the green agenda.

The term is deliberately intended to echo the phrase “Holocaust denier” to those anti-Semites who like to insist that the Holocaust never happened. [bold, links added]

While the comparison is obscene, it’s certainly true that the Holocaust, like the climate agenda, have something in common: They both reflect a blind fanaticism untethered to actual facts.

Climate hysterics demonize carbon dioxide (CO2) much as Hitler stereotyped Jews. They then demonize their critics as “Holocaust deniers” because the psychological link is to demonize critics of the anthropogenic theory as if they were Jew-haters.

However, the term “climate deniers” outside the context of Holocaust denial makes no sense. No rational person would deny that this planet has an atmosphere, weather, and climate.

But honestly, it is climate hysterics who hate their critics, seeing them as “evil,” greedy, hydrocarbon-burning capitalists willing to make Earth’s climate unbearably hot and dangerous for all living things.

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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...?, 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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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...?, 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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