Archives de catégorie : climate-debate

SEA LEVEL: Rise and Fall – Part 3 – Computational Hubris

by Kip Hansen, December 19, 2017 in WUWT


There have been so many very good essays on Global Sea Level Rise by persons all of whom have a great deal more expertise than I.   Jo Nova hosts a dozen or so excellent essays, which point at another score of papers and publications, for the most part clearly demonstrating that there are two contrarian positions on sea level rise in the scientific community:  1) Sea level has risen, is rising and will continue to rise at a rate approximately 8-12 inches (20-30 centimeters) per century — due to geological and long-term climatic forces well beyond our control;  and 2a) Other than explicit cases of Local Relative SLR, the sea does not appear to be rising much over the last 50-70 years, if at all.  2b) If it is rising due to general warming of the climate it will not add much to position 1.

Increased ionization supports growth of aerosols into cloud condensation nuclei

by H. Svensmark et al., December 19, 2017 in NatureCommunications


 (…)In conclusion, a mechanism by which ions condense their mass onto small aerosols and thereby increase the growth rate of the aerosols, has been formulated theoretically and shown to be in good agreement with extensive experiments. The mechanism of ion-induced condensation may be relevant in the Earth’s atmosphere under pristine conditions, and able to influence the formation of CCN. It is conjectured that this mechanism could be the explanation for the observed correlations between past climate variations and cosmic rays, modulated by either solar activity or supernova activity in the solar neighborhood on very long time scales. The theory of ion-induced condensation should be incorporated into global aerosol models, to fully test the atmospheric implications.

See also here

COSMIC RAYS-CLIMATE LINK FOUND

by Dr David Whitehouse, December 19, 2017 in GWPF


The idea of a significant solar influence on climate change via cloud cover produced by cosmic rays has been proposed many times but it lacked conclusive experimental evidence as well as a detailed theoretical framework. Some have labelled the idea controversial with, at best, a weak effect. The principle is that cosmic rays – high-energy particles that traverse the galaxy from supernovae – knock electrons out of air molecules. This produces ions – electrically positive and negative molecules in the atmosphere. The ions help aerosols – clusters of mainly sulphuric acid and water molecules – to form and become stable against evaporation – a process is called nucleation. The problem was that small aerosols need to grow nearly a million times in mass in order to have an effect on cloud formation. Until now, it was not known how this could happen.

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Understanding the climate impact of natural atmospheric particles

by University of Leeds, December 4, 2017 in ScienceDaily


Scientists have quantified the relationship between natural sources of particles in the atmosphere and climate change. Their research shows that the cooling effect of natural atmospheric particles is greater during warmer years and could therefore slightly reduce the amount that temperatures rise as a result of climate change.Share:

 

More Research Points To “Temperature Decline In The Coming Decades And Centuries”

by P Gosselin, December 15, 2017 in NoTricksZone


Geologist Dr. Norman Page left a comment which I’ve decided to upgrade to a post. In it he writes solar and La Nina observations fit well with his recent paper showing that climate is controlled by natural orbital and solar activity cycles.

Dr. Page is among a growing number of scientists who share the general view that natural solar and oceanic cycles are mostly driving the climate, just as they always have in the past.

Shoreline Change in Atoll Reef Islands

in Friends of Science, December 2017


This study gives irrefutable evidence on the persistence of atoll reef islands in French Polynesia over the last five decades, as 92% of the 111 islands studied exhibited either areal stability or expansion since the 1960s. Only 8% of the 111 islands showed contraction in area. Tropical cyclone waves contributed to island upward growth, which reached up to 1 m in places, through the transfer of sediments up onto the island surface.

Calculating the Cost of Global Warming

by Andy May, December 14, 2017 in WUWT


Hopefully, the first two posts in this series, “Do humans harm the environment” and “Population Growth and the Food Supply” have convinced the reader that man-made climate change and global warming are not an existential threat to humanity or the planet. This leaves us in a discussion of the cost of global warming, which is something we can calculate. To do the calculation, we need to estimate the monetary damages caused by global warming, when they will be incurred, and the discount rate of money over that period of time. We will not attempt the calculation here, it is too complex, but we can discuss the parameters and some of the calculations done by others.

Is climate change REALLY the culprit causing California’s wildfires?

by L. Kummer, December 14, 2017 in A. Watts, WUWT


We’re told that climate change caused or intensified California’s wildfires — and that such fires are getting worse. As usual for such scary stories, these claims are only weakly supported by science — except for the ones that are outright fabrications. See what scientists say and decide for yourself.

Dueling science: One study says melting Antarctic ice sheet will flood US east coast, others say ‘uncertain’

by Anthony Watts, December 13, 2017 in WUWT


(…) All of these press releases appeared within a couple of hours of each other on EurekAlert, which is a Science PR clearing house. They will all inevitably get turned into stories by the media. Who could blame the public for being confused when we have such certainty/uncertainty battles like this going on in climate science?

It seems Yogi Berra was right.

It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.

Study: a ‘statistically significant downward trend since 1950 exists’ in hurricane landfalls

by Anthony Watts, December 9, 2017 in WUWT


This is going to rattle some cages, while at the same time vindicating Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. A new study in Geophysical research Letters studies hurricane activity in the Atlantic concludes that a “statistically significant downward trend since 1950 exists”.

An Energetic Perspective on United States Tropical Cyclone Landfall Droughts
Authors Ryan E. Truchelut, Erica M. Staehling

Retraction request for Harvey et al. attack paper on Dr. Susan Crockford

by Dr. S. Crockford, in A. Watts, December 5, 2017 in WUWT


Essay by Dr. Susan Crockford (republished from her website https://polarbearscience.com )on Retraction request to Bioscience: FOIA emails document another harsh criticism of Amstrup’s 2007 polar bear model

Today I sent a letter to the editors of the journal Bioscience requesting retraction of the shoddy and malicious paper by Harvey et al. (Internet blogs, polar bears, and climate-change denial by proxy) published online last week.

The letter reveals information about the workings of the polar bear expert inner circle not known before now, so grab your popcorn.

See also here

“Pseudoscience is embraced, it might be argued, in exact proportion as real science is misunderstood”… Except in the case of climate change.

by David Middleton, December 5, 2017


(…) Petroleum geologists tend to be sedimentary geologists and sedimentary geology is essentially a combination of paleogeography and paleoclimatology. Depositional environments are defined by physical geography and climate. We literally do practice in a different world, the past. Geologists intuitively see Earth processes as cyclical and also tend to look at things from the perspective of “deep time.” For those of us working the Gulf of Mexico, we “go to work” in a world defined by glacioeustatic and halokinetic  processes and, quite frankly, most of us don’t see anything anomalous in recent climate changes.

November Arctic Refreezing 2017

by Ron Clutz, December 2, 2017 in ScienceMatters


Earlier observations showed that Arctic ice extents were low in the 1940s, grew thereafter up to a peak in 1977, before declining.  That decline was gentle until 1994 which started a decade of multi-year ice loss through the Fram Strait.  There was also a major earthquake under the north pole in that period.  In any case, the effects and the decline ceased in 2007, 30 years after the previous peak.  Now we have a plateau in ice extents, which could be the precursor of a growing phase of the quasi-60 year Arctic ice oscillation.

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Global Temperature Report: November 2017

by UAH and Dr. J. Christy in A. Watts, December 4, 2014 in WUWT


The average global temperature drop between October and November, 2017, tied for the fifth largest one-month-to-the-next drop in the 39-year satellite temperature record, according to Dr. John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center (ESSC) at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. Compared to seasonal norms, the average temperature around the globe fell 0.27 C (almost 0.49 degrees F) between October and November. (The largest drop was from January to February 2013, when the global average temperature fell 0.32 C.)

A Veneer of Certainty Stoking Climate Alarm

by Rupert Darwall, November 28, 2017 in CompetitiveEnterpriseInstitut


This essay by Rupert Darwall explores the expressions of public certainty by climate scientists versus the private expressions of uncertainty, in context of a small Workshop on Climate organized by t he American Physical Society (APS). I was privileged to participate in this workshop, which included three climate scientists who support the climate change consensus and three climate scientists who do not — all of whom were questioned by a panel of disting uished physicists (…).

La modélisation du climat, science ou scientisme ?

by Uzbek, 21 novembre 2017, in Climato-Réalistes


Les prévisions climatiques à très long terme (2100) sont établies à l’aide de modèles qui ne sont rien d’autre des logiciels très complexes, dont le but est de reproduire le comportement du climat terrestre.

Comme on ne peut pas décrire ce qui se passe en tous les points de la terre, celle-ci est découpée en mailles de quelques centaines de kilomètres de côté. Les modèles utilisés par le GIEC pour son cinquième rapport d’évaluation (2013) avaient des résolutions relativement grossières (supérieures à 100 km). La situation évolue toutefois rapidement et les modèles climatiques les plus récents auraient une résolution plus fine (de l’ordre de 20 km).

Egalement ici et ici

Study: no acceleration in global warming, climate sensitivity to CO2 too high

by Anthony Watts, November 29, 2017 in WUWT


New research yields old result: Climate warming slow, steady. Observed value is half that of CMIP5 climate models.

The rate at which Earth’s atmosphere is warming has not significantly accelerated over the past 23 years, according to research at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH).

If you take away the transient cooling in 1983 and 1992 caused by two major volcanic eruptions in the preceding years, the remaining underlying warming trend in the bottom eight kilometers (almost five miles) of the atmosphere was 0.096 C (about 0.17° Fahrenheit) per decade between January 1979 and June 2017.

That was unexpectedly close to the 0.09 C warming trend found when similar research was published in 1994 with only 15 years of data, said Dr. John Christy, director of UAH’s Earth System Science Center.

See also here

Global Temperature Trends Based On Non-Existent Data

by P. Homewood, November 28, 2017 in NotaLotofpeopleKnowThat


We are all too familiar with graphs showing how much global temperatures have risen since the 19thC.

The HADCRUT version above is typical, and also very precise, with fairly tight error bars even in the early part of the record.

One wonders where they got the data to work all this out, because it certainly could not have come from thermometers.

All of the major global temperature datasets rely heavily on the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN). Yet as the “Overview of the Global Historical Climatology Network-Daily Database”, published by Matthew Menne et al in 2012, rather inconveniently showed, most of the world had little or no temperature data in the 19thC, and even up to 1950.

Causal feedbacks in climate change

by E.H. van Nes et al., March 30, 2015 in Nature Climate Change


The statistical association between temperature and greenhouse gases over glacial cycles is well documented, but causality behind this correlation remains difficult to extract directly from the data.

We show that such variable time lags are typical for complex nonlinear systems such as the climate, prohibiting straightforward use of correlation lags to infer causation.

Core of climate science is in the real-world data

by Eric Worrall, November 22, 2017 in WUWT


Figure 1 shows one example of data derived from such proxy sources. The top panel of the figure shows a declining temperature trend over the 8,000-year period from the Holocene Climate Optimum to the modern warm period (left-hand scale). It also shows that this location experienced numerous cycles of warming and cooling that involved temperature changes of the order of two degrees Celsius.

Arctic sea ice expanding faster than normal

by Anthony Watts, November 21, 2017 in WUWT


Rapid expansion of the Arctic sea ice cover is the norm for October as solar input dwindles and the remaining heat in the upper ocean is released upwards, warming the lower atmosphere and escaping to space. Because of late season growth, the seasonal Antarctic maximum we previously reported as occurring on September 15 was exceeded, with a new maximum set on October 11 and 12. This is the second-lowest and second-latest seasonal maximum extent in the satellite record.