Archives de catégorie : climate-debate

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.

See also here

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.

US East Coast Sea Level Rise: An Adjustocene Hockey Stick

by Steve McIntyre, November25, 2017 in ClimateAudit


(…) However, as so often, the supposed “hockey stick” appeared only after the data had been severely adjusted. The difference is shown at the figure at right.  Unadjusted (raw) relative sea level (i.e. how sea level appears locally – the concern of state planners and policy-makers) in North Carolina increased steadily through the last two millennia, with somewhat of an upward inflection in the 19th century; it is only after heavy adjustment that a HS shape appears.

John Christy’s Testimony To Congress NOVEMBER 2

by Paul Homewood, November 25, 2017 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat


“Science” is not a set of facts but a process or method that sets out a way for us to discover information and which attempts to determine the level of confidence we might have in that information. In the method, a “claim” or “hypothesis” is stated such that rigorous tests might be employed to test the claim to determine its credibility. If the claim fails a test, the claim is rejected or modified then tested again.

Besting the BEST surface temperature record

by PJ Michaels and R Maue, November 23, 2017 in WUWT


Let’s face it, global surface temperature histories measured by thermometers are a mess. Recording stations come on-and offline seemingly at random. The time of day when the high and low temperatures for the previous 24 hours are recorded varies, often changing at the same station. Local conditions can bias temperatures. And the “urban heat island” can artificially warm readings with population levels as low as 2500. Neighboring reporting stations can diverge significantly from each other.

Temperatures, Sea Levels, Climate Dynamics ‘Have No Apparent Relationship To Atmospheric CO2’

by Kenneth Richard, November 23, 2017 in NoTricksZone


According to the most basic precepts of anthropogenic global warming (AGW), variations in CO2 concentrations exert significant control on sea surface temperatures, glaciers, sea levels, and generalized climate dynamics (i.e., precipitation patterns).

In particular, high CO2 concentrations, driven by human activity, are presumed to cause dangerously warming ocean waters, rapid glacier melt and sea level rise, and overall disruption to the Earth’s biosphere.

Newly published scientific papers wholly undermine this popularized conceptualization.

In fact, according to Bertrand et al. (2017), there has been a “marked cooling” of sea surface temperatures in the southernmost South America region during the last ~800 years — 3°C to 4°C colder than during the Medieval and Roman warm periods — that has continued unabated into “the most recent decades”.

(…)

New Antarctic heat map reveals sub-ice hotspots

by  A. Dinar, November 13, 2017 in GeoSpace-AGU


An international team of scientists, led by British Antarctic Survey (BAS), has produced a new map showing how much heat from the Earth’s interior is reaching the base of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. The map is part of a new paper accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

The team has produced the most up to date, accurate and high-resolution map of the so called ‘geothermal heat flux’ at the base of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Of the basic information that shapes and controls ice flow, the most poorly known about is this heat

New Antarctic Temperature Reconstruction

by Steve McIntyre, November 20, 2017 in ClimateAudit


Stenni et al (2017), Antarctic climate variability on regional and continental scales over the last 2000 years, was published pdf this week by Climate of the Past.  It includes (multiple variations) of a new Antarctic temperature reconstruction, in which 112 d18O and dD isotope series are combined into regional and continental reconstructions.