Archives de catégorie : climate-debate

Geological ‘Hotspot’ Melting Pine Island And Thwaites Glaciers, Not Global Warming

by J.E. Kamis, February 25, 2019 in ClimateChangeDispatch


SUMMARY

Research study after research study has now proven beyond any doubt that the 350,000-square-mile subglacial Marie Byrd Mantle Plume and its associated geological features that are emitting massive amounts of ice melting heat and heated fluid onto the base of the Pine Island Glacier and Thwaites Glaciers.

Failure of the media to include in their numerous articles this telling scientific evidence which substantiates the significant and likely dominant role of this subglacial geologically induced heat flow in melting of West Antarctic glaciers is difficult to reconcile with proper scientific methodology.

A methodology which states that new and relevant data should be used to review old supposedly 100% settled theories.

Most of these research studies have been released one by one during the last three years which has led to minimizing their collective importance.  Numerous previous Climate Change Dispatch articles written by this author beginning in 2014 have inexplicably been ignored by mainstream media outlets.

It’s time for the media to inform the public that by tying all this information together that a clear picture emerges concerning the significant impact of Antarctic subglacial geologically induced heat flow.

Striking study finds a climate tipping point in clouds

by Scott K. Johnson, February 25, 2019 in WUWT


The word “hysteresis” doesn’t immediately seem threatening; it hints at a portmanteau of “history” and “thesis”—a dense read, perhaps, but those never killed anyone. But that’s not what the word means. Hysteresis is a profound behavior some systems can display, crossing a sort of point-of-no-return. Dial things up just one notch, and you can push the system through a radical change. To get back to normal, you might have to dial it down five or six notches.

Earth’s climate system can provide examples. Take the conveyor-belt-like circulation of water in the Atlantic Ocean. Looking back at the past, you can see times that the circulation seems to have flipped into an alternate pattern regarding climatic consequences around the North Atlantic. Switching from one pattern to the other takes a significant nudge, but reversing it is hard—like driving up to the top of a ridge and rolling down into the next valley.

Stratocumulus clouds, like those in the lower two-thirds of this image, are common over the oceans.

NASA Earth Observatory

EL NIÑO HAS ARRIVED — NO WONDER IT’S A WARM MONTH

by GWPF, February 26, 2019


“El Niño conditions across the equatorial Pacific have come together, and we can now announce its arrival,” said Mike Halpert, deputy director, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, and ENSO forecaster.

NOAA gives a 55% chance of El Niño conditions persisting through the spring.

Sea surface temperatures in January — orange-red colors are above normal.

“While sea surface temperatures are above average, current observations and climate models indicate that this El Niño will be weak, meaning we do not expect significant global impacts through the remainder of winter and into the spring,” Halpert said.

What’s Natural? Changing Sea Levels – Part 1

by Jim Steele, February 23, 2019 in WUWT


Local sea levels appear to rise when ocean volumes increase, but also when the land sinks. Scientists increasingly warn that coastal cities are sinking much faster than ocean volumes are rising. Pumping out groundwater not only causes lands to sink, it increases the oceans’ volume. China’s Huanghe Delta is sinking 10 inches a year. Southeast Asian cities battle sinking rates of 1.2 to 2.4 inches per year. Regions around Houston, Texas had sunk 10 feet by 1979; a disaster waiting to happen where hurricanes commonly generate 15-foot storm surges. Likewise, New Orleans was doomed by sinking 1.4 inches per year. Built on marshland, San Francisco’s airport sinks 0.4 inches per year.
In contrast, ocean warming plus added glacial meltwater are estimated to have only added 0.06 inches per year to sea level from 1850 to 1990, punctuated by decades that accelerated sea level rise to 0.14 inches a year. Still, that fastest rate of modern sea level rise remains only one-tenth of New Orleans’ sinking rate.

A global assessment of atoll island planform changes over the past decades

by E. Duvat, October 25, 2018 in WiresClimateChange


Over the past decades, atoll islands exhibited no widespread sign of physical destabilization in the face of sea‐level rise. A reanalysis of available data, which cover 30 Pacific and Indian Ocean atolls including 709 islands, reveals that no atoll lost land area and that 88.6% of islands were either stable or increased in area, while only 11.4% contracted. Atoll islands affected by rapid sea‐level rise did not show a distinct behavior compared to islands on other atolls. Island behavior correlated with island size, and no island larger than 10 ha decreased in size.

Aerosol-driven droplet concentrations dominate coverage and water of oceanic low-level clouds

by  D. Rosenfeld et al., February 8, 2019 in Science

Reflections on cloud effects

How much impact does the abundance of cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) aerosols above the oceans have on global temperatures? Rosenfeld et al.analyzed how CCN affect the properties of marine stratocumulus clouds, which reflect much of the solar radiation received by Earth back to space (see the Perspective by Sato and Suzuki). The CCN abundance explained most of the variability in the radiative cooling. Thus, the magnitude of radiative forcing provided by these clouds is much more sensitive to the presence of CCN than current models indicate, which suggests the existence of other compensating warming effects.

A 119-Year Temperature Reconstruction for the South China Sea

by Y, S., Zheng et al., 2018, Marine Micropaleontology, in CO2Science


According to Yuan et al. (2018), “studies examining sea surface temperature variability over the past one century and their influence on climate change in China are seriously lacking.” And therefore, in an effort to remedy this information void, the team of eight Chinese scientists developed “the first tree-ring-based dendroclimatic sea surface temperature (SST) reconstruction for the South China Sea.”

In accomplishing their objective Yuan et al. cored 22 Pinus massoniana trees in the Changting Region of the Fujian Province, China. Analysis of the cores revealed a statistically significant relationship between the tree-ring series and gridded March SSTs (1°C resolution) of the South China Sea (16-20°N, 112-116°E). Ultimately, this relationship enabled them to produce a proxy temperature reconstruction over the period 1893-2011, which reconstruction is shown below.

Strong Arctic sea-ice growth this year

by Andy May / Javier, February 24, 2019 in WUWT


February is not over, and Arctic sea-ice extent is already over half a million square kilometers higher than last year at this day.

The growing season has not ended, and 2019 Arctic sea-ice extent is already higher than the previous four years and six out of the last 14 years.

Figure 1. Arctic sea-ice extent. Note the left edge of the graph is February 1, not January 1.  http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/

Arctic sea-ice has stubbornly resisted the very warm years between 2015-2017 caused by the big El Niño. Are we going to see an increase in Arctic sea-ice over the next few years? Only time will tell, but the idea cannot be discarded.

Changement climatique : ce que je sais

by Ph.  Laget, 23 février 2019, in MythesManciesMathématiques


En matière climatique, ce que je sais c’est que je ne sais rien. Ou pas grand-chose. Je n’ai rien appris durant mes études sur ce sujet (je suis ingénieur en Mathématiques Appliquées). Mes sources d’information, comme n’importe quel citoyen, se limitent à la lecture de quelques études de spécialistes qui se prétendent experts en climatologie (je n’ai aucun moyen de vérifier le degré de leur expertise), et aux médias qui tentent de vulgariser certaines de ces études. Ces travaux font souvent appel à des calculs sophistiqués que je n’ai pas les moyens ni le temps de vérifier.

Je sais que des scientifiques prétendent avoir démontré qu’il y a un réchauffement climatique global, que sa cause est essentiellement anthropique, et que ses conséquences sont dommageables pour l’homme. Je sais qu’il y a d’autres spécialistes, que les médias appellent climato-sceptiques (certains d’entre eux préfèrent se nommer climato-réalistes), qui disent que c’est faux, et que les causes des perturbations sont surtout naturelles (activité solaire, désynchronisation des champs magnétiques du soleil, modification de l’axe magnétique de la terre, effets des nuages et de la vapeur d’eau, éruptions volcaniques, …).

Top German MP Warns Of Climate Law Dictatorship

by Benny Peiser, February 23, 2019 in GWPF


You know we have overcome the dictatorship of the proletariat here in East Germany, and now we are facing a dictatorship of the climate law. I do not consider this law to be compatible with a market economy. –Andreas Lämmel, CDU member of the German Bundestag, Deutschlandfunk, 23 February 2019

Climate policy is increasingly splitting German’s coalition government of Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and Social Democrats (SPD). The coal exit was supposed to be part of a comprehensive climate law. But if and when that comes no one knows. That’s because the coalition committee has actually stopped the far advanced legislative project of Federal Environment Minister Svenja Schulze (SPD), according to the government.  —Andreas Mihm, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 19 February 2019

La transition énergétique, inutile, dispendieuse, injuste

by Rémy Prud’hommme, 22 février 2019 in ClimatoRéalistes


INTRODUCTION

Le paysage énergétique du globe et de la France a peu changé durant les siècles antérieurs au 19ème siècle. Napoléon et César se déplaçaient, s’éclairaient, se chauffaient, s’habillaient à peu près de la même façon. Depuis le début du 19ème siècle, en revanche, ce paysage change rapidement et radicalement. Les énergies traditionnelles (hommes, animaux, vent, eau) ont été presque éliminées, et remplacées par des énergies nouvelles (charbon, pétrole, électricité, nucléaire). Dans le domaine des transports, par exemple, la marche à pied, le cheval et le bateau à voile ont été supplantés par le chemin de fer, puis l’automobile, puis l’avion, et par le bateau à moteur. Ces changements ont largement contribués à l’extraordinaire amélioration du niveau de vie enregistrée au cours des deux derniers siècles, dans les pays dits développés d’abord, puis, depuis un demi-siècle dans les pays dits en développement.

New York Times hit with backlash for labeling Princeton physicist a ‘climate denialist’

by Valerie Richardson, February 21, 2019 in TheWsahingtonPost


Princeton professor emeritus William Happer’s role in forming a White House climate security committee didn’t sit well with a number of media outlets, including The New York Times, which called the eminent physicist a “denialist.”

The headline prompted a backlash from those who object to applying a derogatory label associated with Holocaust disbelief to scientists and others who challenge worst-case climate-change scenarios.

A propos des indicateurs de température par satellites (2/2)

by JC Maurin, 22 février 2019 in ScienceCimatEnergie


Afin d’élaborer les indicateurs de température, on utilise des radiomètres MSU, AMSU ou ATMS embarqués sur des satellites, puis on construit l’indicateur à partir des mesures et de diverses corrections. On obtient ainsi un indicateur qui concerne la quasi-totalité du globe, contrairement aux indicateurs terrestres basés essentiellement (avant 1980) sur quelques milliers de stations américaines et européennes. Au sujet des mesures par satellites, et sans être spécialiste dans ce domaine, un physicien peut néanmoins donner quelques éléments d’appréciation qu’ignore parfois un lecteur intéressé par la climatologie. Le but de la seconde partie de l’article sera atteint si ce lecteur a appris des éléments nouveaux, il pourra ensuite approfondir la question par lui-même.

First measurable snow in Las Vegas since 1937.

by Anthony Watts, February 21, 2019 in WUWT


NWS Las Vegas writes:

The Las Vegas Valley Snow Event: What happened? Did we see this coming? Yes and no. We had been seeing very small chances for snow in the valley for a few days, but it wasn’t until Sunday afternoon that the hi-resolution models were consistently indicating that western parts of the valley could see up to 3 inches and up to an inch elsewhere. That’s when the decision was made to issue the Winter Weather Advisory.

New Papers Find Significant COOLING In W. Virginia, Appalachia, And The Yellow Sea Since The Early 1900s

by K. Richard, February 21, 2019 in NoTricksZone


Between 1900 and 2016, climatic trends were characterized by significant reductions in the maximum temperatures (−0.78°C/century; p = 0.001), significant increases in minimum temperatures (0.44 °C/century; p = 0.017) [overall -0.34°C/century], and increased annual precipitation (25.4 mm/century) indicative of a wetter and more temperate WV climate. Despite increasing trends of growing degree days during the first (p ≤ 0.015) and second half of the period of record, the long-term trend indicated a decrease in GDD [warm growing degree days] of approximately 100 °C/days.”

Kutta and Hubbart, 2019

Geologic Evidence of Recurring Climate Cycles and Their Implications for the Cause of Global Climate Changes—The Past is the Key to the Future

by  Don J. Easterbrook,  2011 in ScienceDirect


The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was a time of warm climate from about 900 A.D. to 1300 A.D. when global temperatures were apparently somewhat warmer than at present. Its effects were evident in Europe where grain crops flourished, alpine tree lines rose, many new cities arose, and the population more than doubled. The Vikings took advantage of the climatic amelioration to colonize Greenland, and wine grapes were grown as far north as England where growing grapes is now not feasible and about 500 km north of present vineyards in France and Germany. Grapes are presently grown in Germany up to elevations of about 560 m, but from about 1100 A.D. to 1300 A.D., vineyards extended up to 780 m, implying temperatures warmer by about 1.0–1.4 °C (Oliver, 1973).

New Explanation For Missing Global Warming? Scientists Claim Extratropical Volcanoes Underestimated!

by P. Gosselin , February 19, 2019 in NoTricksZone


Readers should note that among climate modelers volcanoes and atmospheric aerosols have been a favorite way of fudging climate models to explain away inconvenient cooling periods that weren’t supposed to happen in a system that is supposed to be dominated by trace gas CO2.

Extratropical volcanoes influence climate more than assumed

Study shows surprisingly strong cooling after volcanic eruptions in mid and high latitudes

NASA hides page saying the Sun was the primary climate driver, and clouds and particles are more important than greenhouse gases

by P. Homewood, February 18, 2019 i


Here’s the text from the original page (my bolding).

NASA 2010: What are the primary forcings of the Earth system?

The Sun is the primary forcing of Earth’s climate system. Sunlight warms our world. Sunlight drives atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns. Sunlight powers the process of photosynthesis that plants need to grow. Sunlight causes convection which carries warmth and water vapor up into the sky where clouds form and bring rain. In short, the Sun drives almost every aspect of our world’s climate system and makes possible life as we know it.

Earth’s orbit around and orientation toward the Sun change over spans of many thousands of years. In turn, these changing “orbital mechanics” force climate to change because they change where and how much sunlight reaches Earth. (Please see for more details.) Thus, changing Earth’s exposure to sunlight forces climate to change. According to scientists’ models of Earth’s orbit and orientation toward the Sun indicate that our world should be just beginning to enter a new period of cooling — perhaps the next ice age.

Repost from JoNova

WHAT DO KIDS WANT? CLIMATE ACTION. WHEN DO THEY WANT IT? DURING DOUBLE MATHS

by Rod Liddle, February 17, 2019 in GWPF/SundaTimes


Such a hectic life these kids lead. On Friday, my lovely 13-year-old daughter was out on the streets of Canterbury with her schoolmates demanding something be done, right now, about climate change, because adults are letting us down and it’s our future and it isn’t fair that horrid right-wing old white men are deliberately destroying the planet.

The next day she was at Gatwick with her mum, off for a half-term ski trip to Norway. I hope she got the irony: all those emissions, just so she could have a chance to snap her femur in half. Still, at least she wasn’t going to the Alps, where the wilderness has been murdered by skiers, the mountains stripped of forest and festooned with lifts and blue runs created by snow machines. Is there a more environmentally ruinous pastime than skiing?

Predicting climate change

by Charles the moderator, February 16, 2019 in WUWT


Thomas Crowther identifies long-disappeared forests available for restoration across the world. He will describe how there is room for an additional 1.2 trillion new trees around the world that could absorb more carbon than human emissions each year. Crowther also describes data from thousands of soil samples collected by local scientists that reveal the world’s Arctic and sub-Arctic regions store most of the world’s carbon. But the warming of these ecosystems is causing the release of this soil carbon, a process that could accelerate climate change by 17%. This research is revealing that the restoration of vegetation and soil carbon is by far our best weapon in the fight against climate change.

The living parts of the planet make it unique from all other parts of the solar system, and they drive every aspect of biogeochemical cycling. It is essential that we represent these living processes into our understanding of current and future biogeochemical cycles in order to understand and predict climate change.

Polar bears walking the streets on Novaya Zemlya are habituated garbage bears, not victims of climate change

by P. Homewood, February 15, 2019


This story could very well be headlined: «When internet came to Novaya Zemlya».

Locals started to post photos and video of the more than 50 polar bears in their neighborhood. Over the last week, social media as well as online newspapers globally have gone mad over the news coming out from one of the remotest towns on the planet, the closed military settlement of Belushaya Guba.

The little-known town on the Russian Arctic archipelago have since last autumn been struggling with polar bears walking the streets and around the corners of apartment- and office buildings. Even walking by a baby-stroller inside an entrance, one of the video-recordings show.

Regional authorities have declared a state of emergency after the bears no longer react to noice- and light signals from guards trying to scare them off.

Belushaya Guba, like the entire Novaya Zemlya, is closed off military area. The newly upgraded air base Rogachevo is just a few kilometers outside of town.

Land Of The Warming Sun: Japan Has Seen Solar Radiation Rise 10% Over Past 60 Years!

by P. Gosselin, February 17, 2019 in NoTricksZone


Today any warming found anywhere almost always gets blamed on heat supposedly getting trapped by rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Moreover, activist scientists insist we ignore all other powerful factors such as solar and oceanic cycles.

In fact these activists have become so extreme that they insist that record cold today is caused by warming.

But as people learned already in the first grade, the earth’s surface warms when the sun shines on it, and tends to cool when clouds obstruct the sun.

Solar radiation at the surface has risen over the past decades

In Japan, the Japanese Meteorology Agency (JMA) has 8 stations that measure solar radiation reaching the surface, and many other for recording temperature.

Data from the 8 stations recording solar radiation are plotted since 1999 (i.e. 20 years) as follows:

Data source: JMA

Carbon gas storage cavern is the best way to obtain clean energy from a fossil fuel

by Charles the moderator, February 13, 2019 in WUWT


The Research Center for Gas Innovation is developing technology to separate CO2 and methane in oil and gas exploration and store it in offshore salt caverns

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo

A set of technologies that is expected to have its first results four years from now is designed to resolve one of the world’s greatest oil and gas exploration challenges today: carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) emission in the atmosphere.

The innovation, the result of a patent deposited in 2018, consists of injecting the CO2 and CH4 that comes from wells during oil extraction into salt caverns as a way to reduce the amount of carbon gas in the emissions.

Le réchauffement climatique d’origine anthropique

by G. Geuskens, 14 février 2019, in ScienceClimatEnergie


Le climat peut changer, comme il l’a toujours fait et continuera à le faire sous l’action de variables naturelles. Les activités humaines peuvent-elles avoir une influence comme le prétend la théorie du réchauffement climatique d’origine anthropique ? Cette théorie est basée sur l’existence d’un hypothétique effet de serre défini comme un phénomène radiatifcausé par des gaz tels la vapeur d’eau ou le CO2 qui absorbent une fraction du rayonnement infrarouge émis par la Terre et le réémettent  ensuite dans toutes  les directions et notamment vers la surface terrestre dont la température serait, de ce fait, plus élevée qu’en l’absence de gaz absorbant l’infrarouge. L’effet de serre résulterait donc essentiellement de l’émission par les molécules de CO2 d’un rayonnement  de fluorescence  dans le domaine infrarouge [1]. Cette définition est claire et scientifiquement valable car conforme au principe de réfutabilité défini par Karl Popper. Nous l’examinerons à la lumière de théories physiques bien établies et de faits expérimentaux connus.

1. Le CO2 dans les basses couches atmosphériques