Archives de catégorie : better to know…?

better to know...?, minerals and ores

Lithium: How the Taliban will fight climate change?

by D.Middleton, Aug 24, 21, 2021 in WUWT

Afghanistan is the “the Saudi Arabia of lithium” –a metal that is essential for electric vehicle batteries and battery storage technologies. According to the International Energy Agency these technologies account for 30 percent of the current global demand for lithium. Demand for lithium is projected to increase 40-fold above 2020 levels by 2040, along with rare earth elements, copper, cobalt, and other minerals in which Afghanistan is also naturally rich.

China currently controls the supply chains for most of the production and/or processing of these minerals. Now China may have another source.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

ANTARCTIC SEA ICE ‘REBOUND’ SURPRISES SCIENTISTS — MSM SILENT

by Cap Allon, Aug 25, 2021 in Electroverse

Just two years ago, many mainstream media outlets declared that sea ice at the South Pole was melting at an “astonishing” rate.

As recently pointed out by notrickszone.com, German national daily Süddeutsche Zeitung reported in June 2019 that Antarctic sea ice had “shrunk 1.8 million square kilometers”, writing: “the massive disappearance of ice is astonishing”.

And while the reporting was technically factual, it has proven to be yet more AGW-driving obfuscation and cherry-picking rather than well-founded indications of a concerning climatic trend.

And now, in 2021, as the ice sharply rebounds, these same MSM outlets have fallen silent–which is speaking volumes…

 

Sea ice at the South Pole has rebounded in 2020 and 2021, to the levels of some 3-decades ago.

Moreover, the trend of the past 40+ years (the satellite era) remains one of significant growth (of approx 1% per decade).

In 2021, Antarctic sea ice is actually tracking well-above the multidecadal average (shown below).

MASSIVE SEA ICE REBOUND GOES UNREPORTED

The climate-ambulance chasing MSM have stopped reporting on the state of the ice across the Southern Hemisphere.

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CLASSIC DISINFORMATION TECHNIQUE

“Researchers are in agreement that the decline in Antarctic sea ice from 2016 to 2019 is due to natural causes,” writes Die kalte Sonne. “Obviously this is not a good topic for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, who prefer not to report on the ice recovery.”

Not informing the public about the most recent developments, but instead leaving them with a false impression based on carefully cherry-picked data from two years prior, is a classic disinformation technique that has long been perfected by the activist media.

For more on Antarctica, see:

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better to know...?, climate-debate

New Study: 2000-Year Precipitation Reconstructions Expose Climate Models Still Of Junk Grade

by Atwood et al., Aug 18, 2021 in NoTricksZone

A new study by Atwood et al (2021) published in the journal of Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology found there’s “poor agreement” between precipitation reconstructions and model simulations over the past 2000 years. This means future projections made by current models are unreliable. 

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Models and reconstructions don’t agree

These comprehensive reconstructions show that from 800 to 1000 CE there was a pronounced drying event relative from the eastern Pacific and parts of Mesoamerica.

Also the period “1400–1700 CE is marked by pronounced hydroclimate changes across the tropics, including dry and/or isotopically enriched conditions in South and East Asia, wet and/or isotopically depleted conditions in the central Andes and southern Amazon in South America, and fresher and/or isotopically depleted conditions in the Maritime Continent.”

The study’s abstract also notes how there’s a glaring disagreement between the simulations done by models and what the reconstructions show: “We find notable dissimilarities between the regional hydroclimate changes and global-scale and hemispheric-scale temperature reconstructions, indicating that more work needs to be done to understand the mechanisms of the widespread tropical hydroclimate changes during the LIA.”

better to know...?, climate-debate

Antarctic Sea Ice Recovery Surprises Scientists… Classic Disinformation Technique Of Not Reporting

by P. Gosselin, Aug 15, 2021 in NoTricksZone

Just two years ago, many of Germany’s mainstream media outlets declared sea ice at the South Pole was melting at an “astonishing” rate. For example, the left of center, Munich based Süddeutsche Zeitung,

German national daily Süddeutsche Zeitung (above) reported in June, 2019, that Antarctic sea ice had “shrunk 1.8 million square kilometers”, writing: “the massive disappearance of ice is astonishing”.

But many readers here, who are aware of the real data, know nothing of the sort over the long term has happened since satellite measurements began over 40 years ago.

Massive sea ice rebound goes unreported

Today, two years later, German climate science site Die kalte Sonne looks at recent sea ice developments in Antarctica – noting that the climate-ambulance chasing mainstream media like the Süddeutsche Zeitung have since mysteriously stopped reporting on Antarctica. Here’s why:

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better to know...?, climate-debate

La cerise catastrophiste du GIEC

by ScienceClimatEnergie, 13 août 2021

Il fallait faire fort et ils l’ont fait : la toute première figure du résumé pour décideurs (SPM) du dernier rapport du GIEC (l’AR6), reproduite ci-dessous (Figure 1), est une véritable cerise sur leur gâteau catastrophiste. La courbe est destinée à faire peur au public, par exemple aux étudiants qui ne connaissent rien (ou très peu) de la science climatique (démonstration ici) et qui ont déjà décidé de faire grève en début d’année scolaire. Elle est également destinée aux décideurs trop occupés à leurs affaires politiques pour pouvoir se permettre d’analyser la courbe en profondeur. N’oubliez pas que le Royaume-Uni accueillera la 26eConférence des Parties des Nations unies sur le changement climatique (COP26) à Glasgow du 1er au 12 novembre 2021. Le SPM tombe donc à pic pour influencer les décideurs qui devront voter.

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Conclusions

En comparant des pommes et des poires (raison n°1), en effaçant des chapitres entiers des livres d’histoire (raison n°2) et en jouant sur l’échelle du graphique (raison n°3), la Figure SPM.1 du GIEC remplit parfaitement son rôle : faire peur aux gens qui ne prennent pas le temps de réfléchir. Et cela marche, les manifestations ne font que commencer. Bravo le GIEC!

Mais ce super tour de passe-passe, ne suggère-t-il pas que le GIEC a perdu les pédales, est à bout de souffle et ne sait plus quoi inventer pour sortir de l’impasse? S’agirait-il d’une première forme de ‘suicide scientifique’? Espérons quand même que de nombreux scientifiques ne seront pas dupes, sinon il y a vraiment de quoi désespérer.

better to know...?, climate-debate

The UN IPCC buries two millennia of fluctuating temperatures

by P. Homewood, Aug 16, 2021 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

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That there has been 1.1°C of warming since 1850 is not especially controversial.  There is some disagreement about the degree to which it reflects the “recovery” from the mini-Ice Age (when there were Ice Fairs on the Thames among other events not seen today) and the effects of increased CO2 emissions.

The controversial part is the removal of temperature oscillations commonly thought to have occurred over the course of the past 2,000 years. These include warming that was known to have occurred in Roman times and again in the tenth century when the Vikings colonised Greenland until 1250, and the cold period 1400-1700.  Such events are downgraded as being either exaggerated or localised.

The earlier iteration of the IPCC 2021 picture was the notorious hockey stick fabrication by Michael Mann.  Mann cherry-picked data from tree rings and spliced together incongruent data sources, and reported his “findings” in a 1998 paper. Like the latest IPCC report, this showed a flat temperature trend until the 20th Century, then a sharp rise.

The IPCC in its 2001 report used Mann’s graph as its poster child to substantiate human-induced global warming.  In the years after 2001 the IPCC quietly dropped Mann’s “hockey stick”.  Its discreditating was completed by 2009 release of confidential emails (dubbed “Climategate”), which showed Michael Mann as the conductor of other climate scientists seeing a need to eradicate the “medieval warming period” in order to make the case that the modern warming is unique.

The chicanery under which this strategy was conducted resulted in legal cases.  Canadian scientist Tim Ball called Mann a fraud, Mann sued and the subsequent court case lasted a decade before finding against Mann. (Mann has managed to string out another case that he brought against Mark Steyn for even longer).

But in the 2021 climate review the “hockey stick” is again the main feature.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Here We Go Again: UN Climate Panel Continues Decades-Long Climate Fear Porn Tradition

by J. Vazquez, Aug 9, 2021 in mrcNewsBusters

Run for cover! The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is warning that we only have a few years to save the planet — a nugget of fear porn the United Nations and the media have been peddling for decades.

Liberal outlet The Guardian ran a climate propaganda story headlined “Major climate changes inevitable and irreversible – IPCC’s starkest warning yet.” The outlet took a nosedive into absurdity by blaming humanity for “climate crimes”: “IPCC’s verdict on climate crimes of humanity: guilty as hell.” The outlet took the IPCC report and screeched that unless “rapid and drastic reductions in greenhouse gases in this decade” are initiated, temperatures would rise by “more than” 1.5 degrees Celsius “above pre-industrial levels,” bringing a “climate breakdown” of “widespread devastation and extreme weather.” President of the 2021 U.N. Climate Change Conference Alok Sharma fearmongered that failing to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius would be “‘catastrophic.'” [Emphasis added.]

The IPCC’s latest scare tactics reflect the words of University of Southampton Professor emeritus John Brignell, as reported by Climate Depot: “The creation of the UN IPCC was a cataclysmic event in the history of science. Here was a purely political body posing as a scientific institution.”

Hoover Institution visiting fellow Bjorn Lomborg has pointed out on Twitter, “UN routinely warns us that we have just a few years left until catastrophe.” The U.N. has a sorry record of those predictions failing to materialize.

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better to know...?

The IPCC Summary For Policymakers

by P. Homewood, Aug 10, 2021 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/#FullReport

If we ignore all of the alarmist rhetoric in the IPCC’s Summary for Policymakers, the real nitty gritty lies in these four sections:

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Conclusion

The reality is that our weather is no worse now than it was 150 years ago. Indeed I would strongly suggest that governments all around the world would be terrified if they were told we were going back to the climate Little Ice Age.

Think I’m kidding? This was exactly scientists thought was going to happen during the global cooldown in the 1970s, and governments were genuinely alarmed.

All that is left in the IPCC report is a host of highly subjective projections of what might happen in the future.

better to know...?, climate-debate

Inside The Acceleration Factory

by W. Eschenbach, Aug 11, 2021 in WUWT

Nerem and Fasullo have a new paper called OBSERVATIONS OF THE RATE AND ACCELERATION OF GLOBAL MEAN SEA LEVEL CHANGE, available here. In it, we find the following statement:

Both tide gauge sea level reconstructions and satellite altimetry show that the current rate of global mean sea level change is about 3 mm yr–1, and both show that this rate is accelerating.

So the claim is that tide gauges show acceleration. Let’s start with a look at the Church and White (hereinafter C&W) estimate of sea level from tide gauges around the world, which is the one used in the Nerem and Fasullo paper. The C&W paper is here.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

How Climate Scenarios Lost Touch With Reality

by R. Pielke Jr & J. Ritchie, Aug, 4, 2021 in CO2Coalition

A failure of self-correction in science has compromised climate science’s ability to provide plausible views of our collective future.

The integrity of science depends on its capacity to provide an ever more reliable picture of how the world works. Over the past decade or so, serious threats to this integrity have come to light. The expectation that science is inherently self-correcting, and that it moves cumulatively and progressively away from false beliefs and toward truth, has been challenged in numerous fields—including cancer research, neuroscience, hydrology, cosmology, and economics—as observers discover that many published findings are of poor quality, subject to systemic biases, or irreproducible.

In a particularly troubling example from the biomedical sciences, a 2015 literature review found that almost 900 peer-reviewed publications reporting studies of a supposed breast cancer cell line were in fact based on a misidentified skin cancer line. Worse still, nearly 250 of these studies were published even after the mistaken cell line was conclusively identified in 2007. Our cursory search of Google Scholar indicates that researchers are still using the skin cancer cell line in breast cancer studies published in 2021. All of these erroneous studies remain in the literature and will continue to be a source of misinformation for scientists working on breast cancer.

In 2021, climate research finds itself in a situation similar to breast cancer research in 2007. Our research (and that of several colleagues) indicates that the scenarios of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions through the end of the twenty-first century are grounded in outdated portrayals of the recent past. Because climate models depend on these scenarios to project the future behavior of the climate, the outdated scenarios provide a misleading basis both for developing a scientific evidence base and for informing climate policy discussions. The continuing misuse of scenarios in climate research has become pervasive and consequential—so much so that we view it as one of the most significant failures of scientific integrity in the twenty-first century thus far. We need a course correction.

In calling for this change, we emphasize explicitly and unequivocally that human-caused climate change is real, that it poses significant risks to society and the environment, and that various policy responses in the form of mitigation and adaptation are necessary and make good sense. However, the reality and importance of climate change does not provide a rationale or excuse for avoiding questions of research integrity any more than does the reality and importance of breast cancer. To the contrary, urgency makes attention to integrity that much more important.

Scenarios and baselines

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Pielke Jr. on AR6

by Pielke Jr. , Aug 9, 2021 in WUWT

IPCC AR6 WG1
Some initial comments
Think of these as working notes
Comments welcomed
Let’s go . . .

Let’s start with scenarios

This is rather huge
“In general, no likelihood is attached to the scenarios assessed in this Report”

So that means that users of the scenarios have to independently assess likelihoods

That said: “the likelihood of high emission scenarios such as RCP8.5 or SSP5-8.5 is considered low”

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better to know...?, climate-debate

In The 1970s Climate Modification Proposals Included Purposely Melting Arctic Sea Ice With Black Soot

by K. Richard, Aug 2, 2021 in NoTricksZone

In his 1975 book The Genesis Strategy, the late climate scientist Dr. Stephen Schneider reviewed contemporary climate modification proposals to reduce the severe 1960s and 1970s droughts, floods, and extreme weather…which were at that time associated with the ongoing global cooling. One proposal was to eliminate the Arctic’s sea ice by having aircraft dump black soot on the ice pack.

In 1974, Schneider reported that the Earth had warmed 0.6°C from 1880 to 1940, then cooled -0.3°C from 1940 to 1970. He suggested the warming could not have been due to human activity, but possibly the ongoing cooling might have been.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

The New Pause lengthens again

by C. Monckton of Brenchley, Aug 3 2021 in WUWT

The New Pause has lengthened by another two months. Even though the brief la Niña that began in late 2020 has now ended, on the UAH dataset there has been no global warming for 6 years 6 months till July 2021. As always, the Pause is calculated as the longest period ending in the present that shows no warming trend, taken as the least-squares linear-regression trend on the UAH satellite monthly global mean surface temperature anomalies for the lower troposphere:

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Criminal Negligence? Authorities Failed To Heed Flood Warnings…”Let People Drown”…”Monumental System Failure”

by P. Gosselin, July 17, 2021 in WUWT/NTZ

Harsh criticism of German authorities failing to act is mounting in the aftermath of the recent deadly floods.

Germany’s New Orleans

Many of the over one hundred people died in the recent flood disaster in Central Western Germany could have been prevented – had the responsible institutions heeded the warnings that had been already issued days in advance by the weather services. Authorities had been warned days early, yet they did nothing to prepare to evacuate and mobilize resources. The media did nothing to warn.

Veteran meteorologist: “much could have been prevented”

Swiss meteorologist Jörg Kachelmann told in a PULS 24 interview that “much of it could have been prevented” and that “people could have been warned”.

“The rainfall could not have been prevented” but the authorities and the “media could have warned the population.” The veteran Swiss meteorologist is surprised by the “surprise of the authorities” and says “people could have been evacuated or at least items moved to higher floors”.

“Let people drown” as “they broadcast shit”

Kachelman also commented to Germany’s leading national daily, Bild: “It hurts when the very people who would have the resources to accompany such a weather situation 24/7 do nothing to save lives. But they broadcast shit and let people drown.”

Unpreparedness becoming a German habit

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Just 25 ‘mega-cities’ produce 52 per cent of the world’s urban greenhouse gas emissions — and 23 of them are in China

by I. Randall, July 12, 2021 in DailyMail

  • Researchers from Sun Yat-sen University recorded the emissions of 167 cities

  • The largest carbon emitters were found to be Asian megacities like Shanghai

  • Cities in Europe and the US emit more than those in most developing countries

  • Of 42 cities with data spanning 2012–2016, 30 showed emissions reductions

  • Yet the team warned we are not on track to meet global climate change targets

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THE WORST EMITTERS

In their study, Dr Chen and colleagues looked at greenhouse gas emissions from 167 cities across 53 countries.

The worst 75 cities for total emissions were as follows (with figures in megatonnes of CO₂ equivalent):

  1. Handan, China (199.71)
  2. Shanghai, China (187.93)
  3. Suzhou, China (151.79)
  4. Dalian, China (142.51)
  5. Beijing, China (132.58)
  6. Tianjin, China (125.89)
  7. Moscow, Russia (112.53)
  8. Wuhan, China (110.86)
  9. Qingdao, China (93.56)
  10. Chongqing, China (80.58)
  11. Wuxi, China (76.88)
  12. Urumqi, China (75.32)
  13. Guangzhou, China (71.03)
  14. Huizhou, China (68.74)
  15. Shijiazhuang, China (67.80)
  16. Zhengzhou, China (66.16)
  17. Tokyo, Japan (66.08)
  18. Shengyang, China (64.10)
  19. Kaohsiung, China (63.64)
  20. Kunming, China (62.96)
  21. Shenzhen, China (62.91)
  22. Hangzhou, China (61.41)
  23. Hong Kong, China (55.90)
  24. Yinchuan, China (55.49)
  25. Chengdu , China (54.49)
  26. New York City, US (51.31)
  27. Manilla, Philippines (49.47)
  28. Bangkok, Thailand (49.22)
  29. Dubai, UAE (48.26)
  30. Seoul, Korea (48.06)
  31. Nanjing, China (47.94)
  32. Istanbul, Turkey (47.53)
  33. Frankfurt, Germany (45.73)
  34. Jakarta, Indonesia (43.86)
  35. Changchun, China (42.62)
  36. Guiyang, China (42.09)
  37. Saint Petersburg, Russia (42.07)
  38. Singapore, Singapore (40.38)
  39. Jinan, China (38.49)
  40. Perth, Australia (36.33)
  41. San Diego, USA (35.02)
  42. Jiaxing, China (33.94)
  43. London, United Kingdom (33.58)
  44. Houston, USA (33.41)
  45. Stuttgart, Germany (32.82)
  46. Caracas, Venezuela (31.77)
  47. Chicago, USA (31.48)
  48. Harbin, China (30.81)
  49. Mexico City, Mexico (30.69)
  50. Lanzhou, China (29.87)
  51. Lagos, Nigeria (29.33)
  52. Xi’an, China (28.15)
  53. Berlin, Germany (27.48)
  54. Taiyuan, China (26.73)
  55. Los Angeles, USA (26.55)
  56. Tshwane, South Africa (26.14)
  57. Nanchang, China (25.17)
  58. Sao Paulo, Brazil (24.95)
  59. Johannesburg, South Africa (24.72)
  60. Changsha, China (24.64)
  61. Hohhot, China (23.47)
  62. Durban, South Africa (22.68)
  63. Mumbai, India (22.57)
  64. Hanoi, Vietnam (22.42)
  65. Torino, Italy (21.86)
  66. Cape Town, South Africa (21.53)
  67. Yokohama, Japan (20.96)
  68. Nanning, China (20.90)
  69. Santiago, Chile (20.03)
  70. Osaka, Japan (19.76)
  71. Hamburg, Germany (19.45)
  72. Chennai, India (19.32)
  73. Hefei, China (18.81)
  74. Toronto, Canada (18.08)
  75. Rotterdam, Netherlands (17.54)
better to know...?, climate-debate

ANTARCTIC SEA ICE EXTENT LARGEST SINCE 2015, AND GROWING

by Cap Allon, July 14, 2021 in Electrroverse

According to the June, 2021 report recently released by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), it is revealed that the ice locked at Earth’s poles is actually GROWING.

The opening paragraph of the report reads: “Sea ice in the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica was well above the 1981 to 2010 average extent in June, rising above the ninetieth percentile near the end of the month”.

But that’s as far as the NSIDC go…

They have plenty to say on the Arctic –which is experiencing its sixth lowest extent on record (big whoop)– but when it comes to Antarctica, I hear nothing but “crickets” — clearly, the icy continent GROWING in mass, and so offsetting the comparatively small losses registered by its northern cousin, is seen as a dampener to the AGW party.

Or perhaps the NSIDC are just letting the data speak for itself:

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… it is revealed that Antarctic sea ice extent, as of June 12 (or day 193), is at an impressive 15.808 million square kilometres (6.104 million square miles) — this is the largest extent at this time of year since 2015, and also sees it tracking well-above the 1979-1990 average.

This news, if you’re an alarmist, is surely something to be celebrated.

The icy continent holds 90% of Earth’s freshwater — so, if you’re one of the gullible that have been conditioned to lose sleep over ‘sea level rise’ then this latest datapoint should quell those fears.

Unfortunately though, alarmists selectively ignore ‘good news’ and instead accumulate only bad news–the news that supports their fears, which, thanks to the likes of the IPCC and their MSM lapdogs, is rammed down our collective throats on a daily basis — it is impossible to ignore.

It’s a type of cognitive dissonance, I guess — people are rejecting new information that conflicts with their existing beliefs, even when the new information is positive: this isn’t how science is supposed to work.

Oh, and the NSIDC has more.

Looking at their historical chart which runs back to 1979, an overall trend of growth is shown here, too.

According to the data, ice around the southern pole has been increasing at ≈1 percent per decade:

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better to know...?, climate-debate

New Study Defies Alarmists, Finds “No Notable Changes” Between Present And Future Cyclone Energy

by P. Gosselin, July 10, 2021 in NoTricksZone

Good news: a warmer, likely tamer climate, is in the future recent science shows. A new study projects no  future increase in tropical storm energy.

Lots of government-funded climate scientists like claiming tropical cyclones are getting worse and that in the future we need to expect one supercharged storm after another – due to man heating the climate with carbon dioxide emissions.

But as we noted yesterday here, Zoe Phin found that hurricanes have not gone along with this dubious doomsday science over the past 25 years. Now a new study confirms things will continue that way.

Today German site Die kalte Sonne (DkS) presents its 49th video on climate and energy, featuring tropical storm energy.

Present vs future scenario

In the segment, DkS cites a new study appearing in the Geophysical Research Letters, where a team of scientists led by Philip Kreussler used three different global climate models to investigate tropical cyclone integrated kinetic energy which is closely associated with their damage potential.

No notable changes

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Claim: Machine Learning can Detect Anthropogenic Climate Change

E. Worrall, July 8, 2021 in WUWT

According to the big computer we are doomed to suffer ever more damaging weather extremes. But researchers can’t tell us exactly why, because their black box neural net won’t explain its prediction.

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As an IT expert who has built commercial AI systems, I find it incredible that the researchers seem so naive as to think their AI machine output has value, without corroborating evidence. They admit they are going to try to understand how their AI works – but in my opinion they have jumped the gun, making big claims on the basis of a black box result.

Consider the following;

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better to know...?

Antarctica wasn’t quite as cold during the last ice age as previously thought

by OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY, June 6, 2021 in WUWT

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A study of two methods for reconstructing ancient temperatures has given climate researchers a better understanding of just how cold it was in Antarctica during the last ice age around 20,000 years ago.

Antarctica, the coldest place on Earth today, was even colder during the last ice age. For decades, the leading science suggested ice age temperatures in Antarctica were on average about 9 degrees Celsius cooler than at present.

An international team of scientists, led by Oregon State University’s Christo Buizert, has found that while parts of Antarctica were as cold as 10 degrees below current temperatures, temperatures over central East Antarctica were only 4 to 5 degrees cooler, about half of the previous estimates.

The findings were published this week in Science.

“This is the first conclusive and consistent answer we have for all of Antarctica,” said Buizert, an Oregon State University climate change specialist. “The surprising finding is that the amount of cooling is very different depending on where you are in Antarctica. This pattern of cooling is likely due to changes in the ice sheet elevation that happened between the ice age and today.”

Understanding the planet’s temperature during the last ice age is critical to understanding the transition from a cold to a warm climate and to modeling what might occur as the planet warms as a result of climate change today, said Ed Brook, a paleoclimatologist at OSU and one of the paper’s co-authors.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

The Manichean Mann

by M. Hulme, June 2021 in IssuesinSci&Techn

Michael Mann has been in the climate wars for well over a decade now. As he reminds us frequently in this new book, he has been in the crosshairs of his enemies, has fought off the attack dogs, and carries the scars of battle. Even the environmentalist Bill McKibben’s promotional puff for the book valorizes Mann in terms of his “scars from the climate wars.” The military framing of climate change long predates Mann’s involvement, but it certainly is a framing he has done much to promote through his blogs, tweets, and general persona-at-large in public discourse.

And so it is not surprising that Mann’s new book continues his characterization of the politics of climate change through a series of complex military tropes and metaphors. Wars, battles, attacks, fights, and enemies litter its 260 pages. Much of what I said about Mann’s combative militancy in my review of his 2012 book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, can be equally applied to this new one. Now, his central argument is that there is a new war afoot. The old war—fought mostly around the claims of climate scientists—has been (largely) won. But a new war has been ignited; Mann and his allies are now having to fight against the forces of inaction.

Mann is half right in his diagnosis. The main axes of public dispute and argumentation about climate change have changed. The politics of climate change manifest differently now than they did a decade ago. More centrally in focus—and this is a good thing—are the substantive and pressing questions about the sorts of actions, policies, and interventions that are needed, appropriate, and effective to attenuate the risks of a changing climate. What are their respective costs and benefits? How do different options interact with diverse cultural values and collide with vested interests? How do they complicate international geopolitics?

So in this observation Mann is correct. The focus of the issue has moved from “is there a problem?” to “what should be done about it?”

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better to know...?

Rising Sea Levels No Cause For Apocalyptic Climate Claims

by J. Tennebaum, May 12, 2021 in ClimateChangeDispatch

Former US Energy Department chief scientist Steven Koonin says sea levels rise at changing rates and sees ‘no signs’ of a climate apocalypse.

Here we continue our interview with Dr. Steven Koonin, chief scientist in the US Department of Energy during the Barack Obama administration and author of the just-published book, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, And Why It Matters

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better to know...?, biology+acidification

Does ocean acidification alter fish behavior? Fraud allegations create a sea of doubt

by P. Homewood, May 7, 2021 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

When Philip Munday discussed his research on ocean acidification with more than 70 colleagues and students in a December 2020 Zoom meeting, he wasn’t just giving a confident overview of a decade’s worth of science. Munday, a marine ecologist at James Cook University (JCU), Townsville, was speaking to defend his scientific legacy.

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But their work has come under attack. In January 2020, a group of seven young scientists, led by fish physiologist Timothy Clark of Deakin University in Geelong, Australia, published a Nature paper reporting that in a massive, 3-year study, they didn’t see these dramatic effects of acidification on fish behavior at all.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

German Professor: Climate Model Deviation From Observations “Striking”…”Politically Significant”

by P. Gosselin, May 8, 2021 in NoTricksZone

At Die kalte Sonne, Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt – one of the founders of Germany’s modern environmental movement – presents his monthly summary, which includes a look at global temperature and how the models are doing.

“The global mean temperature deviation of satellite-based measurements from the mean of the 1991 – 2020 period was -0.05 degrees Celsius in April 2021. Nevertheless, German courts have ruled that something has got to be done about the warming planet!

Global temperature curve in April 2021

The cool La Niña situation over the recent months is still having an effect. According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), there is an 80% probability that La Niña will end between May and July. However, the agency expects a new La Niña to begin again in the fall.

The average temperature increase has been 0.14 degrees Celsius per decade. The model calculations, on which the IPCC’s recommendations are based, come up with a temperature increase that is twice as high for the same period (see chart below, source: R. Spencer 2021).

This striking deviation from the real temperature development is politically significant, because model forecasts are the basis for far-reaching decisions, such as constitutional court rulings.”

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