Archives de catégorie : climate-debate

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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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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 : CERES
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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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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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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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New Study: In Northern Poland The Medieval Warm Period Was 3°C Warmer Than Today

by K. Richard, Feb 17,2022 in NoTricksZone

The temperature record for this region also shows today’s temperatures are not much different than they were during the Little Ice Age.

Another chart contained in the study (Pleskot et al., 2022) shows North America’s and Europe’s mean annual temperatures are nearly the lowest of the last 4,500 years.

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climate-debate

Methane Spikes !

by Kip Hansen, Feb 10, 2022 in WUWT

Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in atmospheric methane

Our ever benevolent and protective scientist class has come to our rescue by raising the alarm – if they didn’t, we might not be adequately alarmed by this dangerous situation.

Seriously, the Nature punchline is, as you may have already guessed:  “some researchers fear that global warming itself is behind the rapid rise.” 

Yes, that’s right.  Global Warming (itself!) may be behind the rapid rise.

The author of the Nature article, Jeff Tollefson, calls this a “grim milestone” (however, no reason for this being either grim or a milestone is given).

Those interested in this trivial issue should read the Nature article.  There are some interesting points in it concerning suspected and hypothesized sources of the methane and the reason for the rather odd pattern of rise and fall seen in multi-year data.

However, here is:

The Bottom Line

1.  Always look at the units attached to any numerical data.

1900 ppb (parts per billion) is 1.9 ppm (parts per million)

Or, in percentage of the atmosphere:

0.000 19 Percent [%]

2.  What that means in the Real World™ is that the amount of methane in the atmosphere is so small — there is more neon and helium in the atmosphere than methane — that if you searched for a molecule of methane, and individually sorted through a BILLION molecules, you might find one or two.  You might find none in your first billion, but if you sorted enough billions, your find would average out at just under 2 per billion. (Good Luck!)

3. As the Earth continues to warm and green as it comes out of the Little Ice Age, we see more life which means more methane.  More life is a Good Thing.

4.  Atmospheric Methane has spiked! — to almost zero.

# # # # #h

Author’s Comment:

Almost Zero is an important issue.  Many of the most popular dangers and harms touted in the popular press are about the crisis of “things” being discovered at levels which are best described as “Almost Zero”.  This is the nutty misapplication of the precautionary principle, where the mere existence —  the mere detection —  of a thing is automatically equated with harm.

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climate-debate

The IPCC CO2 Climate Narrative: A “Behemoth On Clay Feet” …Ready To Collapse

by P. Gosselin, Fab, 6, 2022 in NoTricksZone

The earth’s history provides the solid proof that acquits CO2. The IPCC’s claim of CO2 being the dominant climate factor is a behemoth on clay feet. 

By Fred F. Mueller

Have you ever had an uneasy feeling when watching the aggressive, intolerant stance of the apologists of “man-made climate catastrophe” against all critics?

The overwhelming majority of our elites blame CO2 emitted by mankind to be responsible for “a runaway overheating” of our atmosphere. “The science” spearheaded by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calls for us to renounce fossil fuels and return to the frugal lifestyle of the 18th or 19th century.

You might well find you’re not alone with that unease, which is proliferating rapidly since social media giants have started to censor people daring to question the IPCC’s “science is settled” attitude.

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climate-debate

Another dot on the graphs (Part II)

by Gavin, Feb 2, 2020 in RealClimate

We have now updated the model-observations comparison page for the 2021 SAT and MSU TMT datasets. Mostly this is just ‘another dot on the graphs’ but we have made a couple of updates of note. First, we have updated the observational products to their latest versions (i.e. HadCRUT5, NOAA-STAR 4.1 etc.), though we are still using NOAA’s GlobalTemp v5 – the Interim version will be available later this year. Secondly, we have added a comparison of the observations to the new CMIP6 model ensemble.

As we’ve discussed previously, the CMIP6 ensemble contains a dozen models (out of ~50) with climate sensitivities that are outside the CMIP5 range, and beyond the very likely constraints from the observations. This suggests that comparisons to the observations should be weighted in some way. One reasonable option is to follow the work of Tokarska et al (2020) and others, and restrict the comparison to those models that have a transient climate response (TCR) that is consistent with observations. The likely range of TCR is 1.4ºC to 2.2ºC according to IPCC AR6, and so we plot both the mean and 95% spread over all all models (1 ensemble member per model) (grey) and the TCR-screened subset (pink).

CMIP6 model means and spreads since 1979 (reader friendly version).

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climate-debate

Germany January Mean Temperatures Falling Since 1988, Contradicting Claims Of Warming

by NoTricksZone, Feb 2, 2022 in WUWT

According to the media and climate alarmists, winters like we used to have in the global cooling days of the 1970s were supposed to be disappearing due to increasing warming from rising CO2.

But that hasn’t really been happening. For example, Stefan Kämpfe at the European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE) plotted Germany’s mean January temperature going back to 1988:

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better to know...?, climate-debate

105 More Non-Global Warming/Non-Hockey Stick Temperature Records Added To The Database In 2021

by K. Richard, Jan 31, 2022 in NoTricksZone

Since 2019,there have been over 350 peer-reviewed scientific papers published showing no warming in the modern era and/or much warmer temperatures than today when CO2 levels ranged from 180 to 280 ppm (Holocene, Pleistocene).

Below is the link to the updated (now including 2021) database of non-hockey temperature records from locations across the world.

These hundreds of papers suggest a) Earth was multiple degrees warmer than today throughout much of the last 11,700 years (Holocene), and b) there has been nothing unusual about temperature changes in the modern era.

The first 8 papers on the 2021 list are shown below as samples.

Over 350 Non-Hockey Sticks (2019-2021)

Zhou et al., 2021  South China Sea ~4°C warmer SST during the Middle Holocene…1994-2004 coldest temperatures of the last 6000 years.

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Climate Alarmists Conceal Global Temperature Anomaly Measurement Declines Despite Increasing Atmospheric CO2

by L. Hamlin, Jan 17, 2022 in WUWT

OAA published its global climate report for year end 2021 highlighting that its global temperature anomaly measurements showed 2021 being the sixth highest of its recorded measurements. NOAA’s global annual measurement for 2021 was 0.84 degrees C.

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NOAA chose to emphasize that the annual 2021 temperature anomaly was in the top ten of its recorded years as follows:

“The year culminated as the sixth warmest year on record for the globe with a temperature that was 0.84°C (1.51°F) above the 20th century average. The years 2013–2021 all rank among the ten warmest years on record.”

What NOAA failed to highlight was that the year-end 2021 global temperature anomaly measurement marked the continuing decline of its global temperature anomaly measurements that have now fallen for the last 6 years since peak year 2016 as shown in their graph below. These declining measurement outcomes make a complete mockery of recent climate alarmists scientifically unsupported politically contrived “climate emergency” propaganda claims.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Using A Reference Period Outdated 30 Years, Germany’s DWD Weather Service Turns Cooling Into Warming

by Prof. F. Vahrenholt, Jan 8, 2022 in NoTricksZone

Globally, the deviation of the global mean temperature of the satellite-based measurements from the mean of period 1991-2020 rose slightly in December to 0.21 degrees Celsius. The mean temperature increase since satellite measurements began was 0.14 degrees Celsius per decade. The year 2021 was an average year compared to 2010 to 2020, with 0.134 degrees deviation from the thirty-year average. Six years since 2010 were warmer and 5 years were colder.

This is also true for Germany. But the German weather service gives a different impression

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How the German DWD Weather Service turned cooling into warming in 2021  

In its press release on Germany’s weather in 2021, the German Weather Service writes: “The mean temperature [Germany] in 2021 was 9.1 degrees Celsius (°C), 0.9 degrees above the value of the internationally valid reference period 1961 to 1990. 2021 was thus the eleventh year in a row that was too warm.”

Why does the DWD use the internationally no longer valid 1961-1990 reference period? It writes itself elsewhere: “To record the climate and its changes, mean values are formed over a period of 30 years…With the end of the year 2020, the reference period for current climatological assessments was replaced by the 1991 to 2020 period.”

Fudging with the reference period

The DWD thus followed the World Meteorological Organization (WMO)recommendation. But in the press release, the DWD still prefers to use the old, outdated period. The 1991 to 202 0reference period differs from the one of 1961 to 1990 by 1.1 degrees. So the DWD should have written : “2021 was 9.1 degrees, 1.3 degrees cooler than 2020 and even -0.2 degrees Celsius below the average from 1991 to 2020. Since 1991 there have only been 9 years colder than 2021.”

But 0.9 degrees more and the eleventh year in a row that is too warm (compared to the colder period of 1961-1990) of course fits much better with the zeitgeist.

Read original in German at Die kalte Sonne. 

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Nearly 140 Scientific Papers Detail The Minuscule Effect CO2 Has On Earth’s Temperature

by K. Richard, Jan 13, 2022 in  NoTricksZone

We have updated our “Extremely Low CO2 Climate Sensitivity” scientific paper list with new papers added from 2021 and some newly discovered papers from the past.

As of 2016 this list had only 50 papers on it (as indicated by the web address). In less than 6 years the list has grown to 137 (as of today).

Click on the link for the full list.

135+ Papers Find Extremely Low CO2 Climate Sensitivity

A few of the sample papers are shown here.

Coe et al., 2021 (2XCO2 [400 to 800 ppm] = 0.5°C)

The HITRAN database of gaseous absorption spectra enables the absorption of earth radiation at its current temperature of 288K to be accurately determined for each individual atmospheric constituent and also for the combined absorption of the atmosphere as a whole. From this data it is concluded that H2O is responsible for 29.4K of the 33K warming, with CO2 contributing 3.3K and CH4 and N2O combined just 0.3K. Climate sensitivity to future increases in CO2 concentration is calculated to be 0.50K, including the positive feedback effects of H2O, while climate sensitivities to CH4 and N2O are almost undetectable at 0.06K and 0.08K respectively. This result strongly suggests that increasing levels of CO2 will not lead to significant changes in earth temperature and that increases in CH4 and N2O will have very little discernable impact.

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Decembers 1961 & 1971

by P. Homewood, Jan 7, 2022 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

 

December 1961 can be summed up in two words – cold and snow. The month was the 9th coldest on record since 1884.

The first week saw widespread snow and severe gales, whilst the Christmas week was one of the coldest of the century, with more heavy snow:

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https://digital.nmla.metoffice.gov.uk/SO_7498a04d-6a40-4207-a27f-772663ffd2fc/

In this monthly lookback through the archives, two things are abundantly clear for every month we have checked:

1) Weather was every bit as extreme in the past

2) The weather can vary enormously from one year to another. This can not be better exemplified than the series for December, which has offered up very mild months to very cold ones, very dry ones to very wet, and very snowy ones to very little snow.

better to know...?, climate-debate

Where Is The Top Of The Atmosphere?

by W. Essenbach, Jan 7, 2022 in WUWT

In my last post, entitled Advection, I was discussing the online MODTRAN Infrared Light In The Atmosphere model. A commenter pointed out that in the past I’d wondered about why the MODTRAN results showed that a doubling of CO2 caused a clear-sky top-of-atmosphere (TOA) decrease in upwelling longwave (LW) radiation of less than the canonical value of 3.7 watts per square meter (W/m2) per doubling of CO2. Here’s that data.

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Scientists Recruiting Kids for Climate Propaganda

by E. Worrall, Dec 27, 2021 in WUWT 

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The researchers found that children do bring home what they’ve learned at school and communicate it to their parents, engaging in ways that spur parents to reconsider their views. This is partly due to the trust that exists between parents and children, making it easier to talk about an emotionally-charged issue such as climate change. Over the years, both the control and experimental groups developed more concern about climate change, but the change was most pronounced in families where children were taught the curriculum

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Increasingly Powerful Tornadoes???

by Robert Vislocky, Dec 29, 2021 in WUWT

After every tragic meteorological event there will inevitably be the alarmist cries that climate change was a substantial influence. The recent late-season tornado outbreak of Dec 10-11 is no exception. Usually most of these are appeals to emotion with no data to support the relationship between extreme weather and climate change. However, this tweet from Michael Mann pointed to a 2019 peer-reviewed study titled “Increasingly Powerful Tornadoes in the United States” by Elsner et al.1

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Arctic Ocean Warming Began Already In Early 20th Century, Meaning Natural Factors Strongly At Play, Not CO2

by University of Cambridge, Dec 29, 2021 in NoTricksZone

In a recent paper, scientists expressed their surprise that the Arctic had started warming already back in the early 20th century, 100 years ago. This, along with the obligatory CO2 climate warming lip service, is described in a Cambridge University press release.

Natural oceanic currents

The Arctic Ocean has been getting warmer since the beginning of the 20th century—decades earlier than records suggest—due to warmer water flowing into the delicate polar ecosystem from the Atlantic Ocean.

An international group of researchers reconstructed the recent history of   at the gateway to the Arctic Ocean in a region called the Fram Strait, between Greenland and Svalbard.

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The researchers used geochemical and ecological data from ocean sediments to reconstruct the change in water column properties over the past 800 years. They precisely dated sediments using a combination of methods and looked for diagnostic signs of Atlantification, like change in temperature and salinity.

“When we looked at the whole 800-year timescale, our temperature and salinity records look pretty constant,” said co-lead author Dr. Tesi Tommaso from the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council in Bologna. “But all of a sudden at the start of the 20th century, you get this marked change in temperature and salinity—it really sticks out.”

“The reason for this rapid Atlantification of at the gate of the Arctic Ocean is intriguing,” said Muschitiello. “We compared our results with the ocean circulation at lower latitudes and found there is a strong correlation with the slowdown of dense water formation in the Labrador Sea. In a future warming scenario, the deep circulation in this subpolar region is expected to further decrease because of the thawing of the Greenland ice sheet. Our results imply that we might expect further Arctic Atlantification in the future because of climate change.”

The researchers say that their results also expose a possible flaw in climate models, because they do not reproduce this early Atlantification at the beginning of the last century.

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New Research: “CO2 Influence On Global Temperature Development Since1860 Only Half As Large As IPCC Estimate!

by  F. Vahrenholt, Dec 14, 2021 in NoTricksZone

On November 3, 2021, the renowned scientific journal Climate published a paper on solar influence on climate.

The paper by the renowned solar researcher Dr. Frank Stefani from the Helmholtz Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf is entitled: “Solar and Anthropogenic Influences on Climate: A Regression Analysis and Tentative Predictions” and concludes that the influence of CO2 on the development of global temperatures from 1860 until today was only about half as large as the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assumed.

As a reminder, the IPCC concludes that 98% of the warming ( 1.07 degrees out of 1.09 degrees) is human-induced. According to Stefani’s analysis, the solar influence accounts for 30-70%.

Stefani examined the course of the geomagnetic aa – index, which reflects the strength of the earth’s magnetic field. This index has been measured in Cambridge and Melbourne since 1844 and reflects the influence of solar activity. In earlier publications, Stefani had already been able to prove that the 11-year solar cycle is triggered by the gravitational forces of Venus, Earth and Jupiter, which are in orbital resonance every 11.07 years (here, here and here).

Since the Sun – influenced by all the planets (especially Jupiter and Saturn) – also moves around the center of gravity of the solar system, solar cycles arise that have become known in temperature history as the 193-year Suess-de Vries cycle and the 90-year Gleissberg cycle.

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Promoters of polar bear catastrophe in Hudson Bay gloss over recent good ice conditions

by S. Crockford, Dec 8, 2021 in PolarScience

Hudson Bay has been oddly slow to freeze this year, which has led to a predictable bit of hand-wringing from certain biologists reiterating prophesies of polar bear population collapse. However, since 2009, the last time that freeze-up was anywhere near this late was 2016. In other words, far from this years’ late freeze-up being a picture of ‘the new normal,’ conditions in 2021 are actually unusual compared to the last twelve years.

Perhaps the last bear leaving Cape Churchill for the sea ice, 4 December 2021.

Moreover, considering that 2021 fall ice formation for the Arctic in general is well ahead of 2016 (and every year since, except 2018), it’s hard to see why human-caused global warming caused by ever-increasing CO2 emissions explains the slow freeze-up of Hudson Bay. Timing of Hudson Bay freeze-up has always been highly variable from one year to the next (Castro de la Guardia et al. 2017: Fig. 3, copied below). The average freeze-up date in the 1980s was 16 November ± 5 days, while from 2005-2015 this had shifted about a week to 24 November ± 8 days (Castro de la Guardia et al. 2017:230). This year freeze-up was later than usual but last year and the three years before that the ice froze as early as it did in the 1980s. Cue the zombie apocalypse.

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