Archives de catégorie : better to know…?

Jan 2020: Coldest ever day in Greenland -65C comes, goes, no one notices

by JoNova, February 2020


The coldest ever day recorded in Greenland stands at -63.3 C  (minus 81 F).  But on January 2nd in 2020, after Greenland suffered a century of global warming, the thermometer at Summit Camp sunk to at least -64.9C. I say, at least, because it may have been even colder. Sharp eyes of Cap Allon at Electroverse saw it hit minus 66C. Ryan Maue also saw it and predicted there would be cold as the Arctic Oscillation broke down.

I sought confirmation at the time (among the Bushfire days in Australia). I looked for any official tweet even, but couldn’t find any. How’s that work — a new all time record for a whole continent for any month of the year, and no one who was paid to care about these things even writes a paragraph?

Good for Paul Homewood, who wrote to the DMI (Danish Met Institute) and has now confirmed that the NOAA GeoSummit  records showed it got down to -64.9 C, an all time record.

Do We Really Have Only 12 Years to Live?

by Andy May, February 23, 2020 in WUWT


Why have uninformed celebrities and politicians been telling everyone, who will listen, we are all going to die in a climate catastrophe in 10 to 30 years? U.N. General Assembly President María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés of Ecuador warned us…

 

However, these absurd statements are not supported by even the most fanatical climate alarmists, like Kate Marvel (NASA), Gavin Schmidt (NASA), Katharine Hayhoe (Texas Tech), or Andrea Dutton (University of Florida) (link). The original inspiration for these statements came from a 2018 IPCC report entitled Global Warming of 1.5°C. Even the alarmist Scientific American does not think the world is ending in twelve years.

We will discuss this IPCC report below, but first let’s look at some critical evidence that is not in the report. As usual the IPCC dodges the current benefits of warming and additional CO2, so we need to fill in this gap.

A little over two years ago I posted an essay entitled “Calculating the Cost of Global Warming,” it did not calculate a cost, but discussed calculations made by others. Global warming and the increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere are not existential threats to mankind or to nature. Global warming will not go “runaway,” this idea, discussed here, has been discredited by climate change skeptics and by climate alarmists alike (see here and here for examples). So, given that global warming and additional CO2 will not harm us, we are reduced to a discussion of the economic impacts and benefits, both positive and negative, of global warming and additional CO2.

 

Figure 2. A graph of CMIP5 global tropospheric temperatures (5-year averages) versus satellite and weather balloon observations. These predictions are for the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 4.5, a moderate case. Source: House of Representatives report by Dr. John Christy.

Unexpected ice

by N. Vizcarra, February 2020 in EarthData/NASA


Paul Holland, a climate modeler with the British Antarctic Survey, has spent the last ten years studying Antarctica’s sea ice and the Southern Ocean. Lately, he has been scrutinizing the seasons of Antarctica and how fast the ice comes and goes. Holland thinks these seasons may be a key to a conundrum: If Earth’s temperatures are getting warmer and sea ice in the Arctic has been shrinking fast, why then is sea ice in the Antarctic slowly increasing?

Spring surprise

Holland used data from NASA’s National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center (NSIDC DAAC) to calculate the ice concentration rate of growth for each single day, which he called intensification; and the total ice area rate of growth, which he called expansion. “I did that for all thirty years of data and plotted the trends,” he said. Holland’s plots showed that the different regions in the Southern Ocean contributed to the overall increase, but they had very diverse trends in sea ice growth. This suggested that geography and different wind patterns played a role. So to gain more insight Holland looked at seasonal wind trends for the different regions.

Holland found that winds were spreading sea ice out in some regions and compressing or keeping it intact in others and that these effects began in the spring. It contradicted a previous study in which, using ice drift data, Holland and Ron Kwok from the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) found that increasing northward winds during the autumn caused the variations.

“I always thought, and as far as I can tell everyone else thought, that the biggest changes must be in autumn,” Holland said. “But the big result for me now is we need to look at spring. The trend is bigger in the autumn, but it seems to be created in spring.”

“Paul has created two more sea ice metrics that we can use to assess how Antarctic sea ice is responding,” said researcher Sharon Stammerjohn, referring to the measures of intensification and expansion. The new metrics help assess how the system is responding as opposed to simply monitoring the state of the system. “Say your temperature is at 99.2 degrees Fahrenheit,” Stammerjohn said. “You don’t have any insight to that temperature unless you take it again an hour later and you see that it changed to 101 degrees. Then you can say, okay, my system is responding to something.”

Study: Large Part Of 20th-Century Warming Caused By CFCs

by Prof. F. Vahrenholtz, February 20, 2020 in ClimateChaneDispatch


A few days ago, an international research group from the USA, Canada, and Switzerland led by Lorenzo Polvani of Columbia University (New York) published a sensational study in Nature climate change, which attributes a large part of the warming of the 20th century to CFCs (“Substantial twentieth-century Arctic warming caused by ozone-depleting substances“).

Using ten climate models, the researchers calculated the global and Arctic temperature development, once with CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) in the atmosphere and once without.

According to these models, from 1955 to 2005, global temperatures increase by 0.59°C with CFCs and by 0.39°C without CFCs. One-third of the warming is therefore not caused by CO2 but by the CFCs.

If the remaining warming for CO2 is converted over the five decades, average warming of 0.08°C per decade remains. Not exactly a lot. CFCs have a 19,000-23,000 times stronger forcing than CO2.

Half of Arctic warming due to CFCs

Continuer la lecture de Study: Large Part Of 20th-Century Warming Caused By CFCs

RETOUR SUR 2019

by Samuel Furfari, 21 février 2020, in ScienceClimatEnergie


L’année 2019 aurait été celle de l’hystérie climatique. Les manifestations des jeunes qui ont suivi avec enthousiasme les conseils d’une jeune suédoise ont donné à des politiciens en quête de raison d’être une opportunité pour montrer qu’ils s’occupent de la jeunesse, mais aussi de l’environnement ou plus précisément de « sauver la Planète ».
Qui n’est pas en faveur de la protection de l’environnement ?
Qui n’est pas attentif à la santé ?
L’occasion rêvée pour redonner du sens à la politique était trop belle, d’autant plus qu’il y avait en 2019 l’élection d’un nouveau parlement européen. L’inflation de promesses inconsidérées ne s’est pas fait attendre. Elle a abouti le 11 décembre 2019 à la publication d’une nouvelle stratégie de la Commission européenne appelée « Green Deal » et à son adoption par le Conseil européen le 13 décembre, avec un parlement européen qui en veut encore plus.

L’inflation des promesses est à son comble, tout comme le budget qu’il va falloir débourser pour atteindre ces promesses, destinées en fait à redonner une raison d’être à une Union européenne en manque de projets enthousiasmants pour ses citoyens et ignorée par les pays qui dirigent  les grands enjeux géopolitiques comme l’a manifestement montré le camouflet infligé à Angel Merkel lors de la conférence sur la Libye à  Berlin le 21 janvier 2020 .

Pourtant, sur le front de l’énergie, et non des politiques énergétiques, le début de la révolution annoncée n’a même pas commencé. Au contraire, la toute-puissance des énergies fossiles a été confirmée voire renforcée. La nouvelle géopolitique de l’énergie, qui a été créée grâce à l’abondance des énergies fossiles, s’est affermie et est entérinée par une grande partie du business de l’ énergie.

Britain’s Floods Have Nothing To Do With Climate Chang

by J. Delingpole, February 19, 2020 in ClimateChangeDispatch


Boris Johnson’s Greenest Government Evah has come up with a brilliant new excuse to duck its responsibilities for all the floods now swamping parts of Britain: climate change ate our homework.

From Hereford to Shrewsbury and South Wales to North Yorkshire, swathes of Britain are underwater thanks to flooding in the aftermath of Storm Dennis, which so far has claimed five lives.

There are currently more than 400 flood warnings around Britain, with more heavy rain forecast to come.

But the government has effectively absolved itself of responsibility by pinning the blame on ‘climate change.’

Environment Secretary George ‘Useless’ Eustice has said in an interview with LBC radio that the scale of the flooding is due to the ‘nature of climate change.’

Sir James Bevan, the chief executive of the Environment Agency, has gone a step further by blaming ‘the climate emergency.’

None of this is true. There is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that these floods are anything other than an entirely normal, cyclical event which has been repeated many times over many centuries — with or without the contribution of anthropogenic CO2.

Also : TWO NAMED STORMS HIT THE UK WITHIN TWO SUCCESSIVE WEEKENDS — “CLIMATE CHANGE TO BLAME!” BARK THE ILL-INFORMED

The UN’s Planet Saving Delusion

by Donna Laframboise, February 19, 2020 in BigPictureNews


The UN couldn’t help Haiti recover from an earthquake. But it imagines we’d all perish without it.

UNESCO is supposed to be about cultural preservation. Toward the end of last year, its in-house magazine nevertheless published a special issue on climate change. The official editorial employs the usual cliches. Catastrophic consequences. The “greatest global challenge of our times.” Blah, blah.

Hilariously, this editorial implies that, without a UN plan, the planet simply won’t survive. Earth to UNESCO: could we spend five minutes talking about how the UN has failed – tragically and comprehensively – to save Haiti?

That nation has less than 12 million people. It’s slightly smaller than the US state of Maryland. Because it comprises half of an island, its borders are well-defined. The UN has had a significant presence there since 2004, yet Haiti remains a basket case.

After a devastating earthquake struck in 2010, rebuilding was a huge job at which the UN was spectacularly inept. But that isn’t the half of it. UN peacekeepers then infected the already traumatized local population with cholera.

The peacekeepers were from Nepal, which had just experienced a cholera outbreak. The UN took no steps to ensure its personnel weren’t carrying the disease. Nor did it establish proper sanitation at their encampment. Untreated sewage got dumped into the country’s most important river, contaminating water that was used for drinking, cooking, and bathing.

Plausible scenarios for climate change: 2020-2050

by Judith Curry, February 13, 2020 in WUWT


A range of scenarios for global mean surface temperature change between 2020 and 2050, derived using a semi-empirical approach. All three modes of natural climate variability – volcanoes, solar and internal variability – are expected to act in the direction of cooling during this period.

In the midst of all the angst about 1.5oC or 2.0oC warming or more, as defined relative to some mythical time when climate was alleged to be ‘stable’ and (relatively) uninfluenced by humans, we lose sight of the fact that we have a better baseline period – now. One advantage of using ‘now’ as a baseline for future climate change is that we have good observations to describe  the climate of  ‘now’.

While most of the focus of climate projections is on 2100, the period circa 2020-2050 is of particular importance for several reasons:

  1. It is the period for meeting UNFCCC targets for emissions reductions

  2. Many financial and infrastructure decisions will be made on this time scale

  3. The actual evolution of the climate over this period will influence 1) and 2) above; ‘surprises’ could have adverse impacts on decisions related to 1) and 2).

Figure 1: CO2-induced warming as a function of cumulative emissions and TCRE. Millar et al

 

Continuer la lecture de Plausible scenarios for climate change: 2020-2050

Physics Professor: CO2’s 0.5°C Impact After Rising To 700 ppm Is So Negligible It’s ‘Effectively Unmeasurable’

by P. Stallinga, February 13, 2020 in NoTricksZone


Dr. Peter Stallinga has published a comprehensive analysis of the Earth’s greenhouse effect. He finds an inconsequential role for CO2.

Doubling CO2 from 350 to 700 ppm yields a warming of less than 0.5°C (500 mK).

Feedbacks to warming are likely negative, as adding CO2 may only serve to speed up natural return-to-equilibrium processes.

As for absorption-reemission perturbation from CO2, “there is nothing CO2 would add to the current heat balance in the atmosphere.”

A portion of Dr. Stallinga’s paper worth highlighting – which he mentions only in passing – refers to the early history of the Earth’s greenhouse effect paradigm.

K. Ångström receives little attention as a pioneer of the conceptualization that warming and cooling resul from radiative imbalances within a planetary greenhouse effect.

About 120 years ago, Ångström (1900) contradicted the oft-cited Arrhenius (1896) – the atmospheric physicist referred to by proponents of anthropogenic global warming.

Ångström suggested Earth’s greenhouse effect is already saturated in its current (1900) state, and therefore increasing CO2 will have “no effect whatsoever” on climate (Stallinga, 2020).

Ångström’s conclusions were largely ignored.

..

Climatologie actuelle, un (petit) pas vers plus de réalisme ?

by SCE-INFO, 7 février 2020 in ScienceClimatEnergie


Nature, l’une des plus célèbres revues scientifiques à l’échelle mondiale, vient de publier un article assez inattendu. Celui-ci se permet une analyse critique des scénarios climatiques proposés dans les rapports du GIEC (scénarios RCP, i.e. “Representative Concentration Pathways”). Comme on peut le constater chaque jour en consultant les médias, ce sont toujours les scénarios les plus catastrophiques qui sont relayés. Continuer la lecture de Climatologie actuelle, un (petit) pas vers plus de réalisme ?

GREENLAND’S SMB GAINED 7 GIGATONS YESTERDAY

by Cap Allon, February 7, 2020 in Electroverse


Despite decades of doom-and-gloom prophecies, Greenland’s Ice Sheet is currently GAINING monster amounts of “mass”— 7 gigatons yesterday alone (Feb. 06, 2020).

Crucial to the survival of a glacier is its surface mass balance (SMB)–the difference between accumulation and ablation (sublimation and melting). Changes in mass balance control a glacier’s long-term behavior, and are its most sensitive climate indicators (wikipedia.org).

On the back of substantial SMB gains over the past few years, the Greenland ice sheet looks set to continue that trend in 2019-20. On February 06, 2020, the world’s largest island added a monster 7 gigatons to its ice sheet. According to climate alarmists, this simply shouldn’t be happening in a warming world. In fact, it might as well not be happening–developments like this NEVER receive MSM attention, meaning alarmists are NEVER privy to the full and unalarming picture…

http://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/

Earth about to enter 30-YEAR ‘Mini Ice Age’ with -50C temperatures in coldest regions, scientists warn

by Harry Pettit, February 2, 2020 in TheSun


Earth is bracing for a solar minimum: a quiet period in which the Sun fires less energy – or, heat – at our planet than usual.

According to Nasa, the Sun will reach its lowest activity in over 200 years in 2020.

This could cause average temperatures to drop as much as 1C in a cold spell lasting 12 months, according to Northumbria University expert Valentina Zharkova.

That might not sound like much, but a whole degree is very significant for global average temperatures.

However, Professor Zharkova warned icy spells and wet summers could persist until solar activity picks up again in 2053.

She listed recent unusual chills in Canada and Iceland as evidence of the Grand Solar Minimum (GSM) already taking hold.

“The reduction in temperature will results in cold weathers on Earth, wet and cold summers, cold and wet winters,” she told The Sun.

“We will possibly get big frosts as is happening now in Canada where they see [temperatures] of -50C.

Green Energy: German Electricity Prices Skyrocket To Record Highs

by P. Gosselin & H. Douglas, Jan 27, 2020 in ClimateChangeDispatch


For a long time, electricity prices have known only one direction: upwards! Ever faster, ever more clearly.

Now the shock for many families: The Federal Government has presented official figures in an answer to an inquiry from the FDP Free Democrats parliamentary group in the Bundestag and announced the true extent of the electricity price increase.

320 euros extra annually per household

In the past ten years, the price of electricity for households and industry has risen by a third.

According to the Augsburger Allgemeine, which quotes from the paper, the price of electricity rose by 35 percent between 2009 and 2019.

For a typical household with 4,000 kWh per year, this means 320 euros in additional costs for electricity alone.

This is even more than the various comparison websites had previously calculated.

Patterns of thinning of Antarctica’s biggest glacier are opposite to previously observed

by University of Bristol, January 27, 2020 in ScienceDaily


Using the latest satellite technology from the European Space Agency (ESA), scientists from the University of Bristol have been tracking patterns of mass loss from Pine Island — Antarctica’s largest glacier.

They found that the pattern of thinning is evolving in complex ways both in space and time with thinning rates now highest along the slow-flow margins of the glacier, while rates in the fast-flowing central trunk have decreased by about a factor of five since 2007. This is the opposite of what was observed prior to 2010.

Pine Island has contributed more to sea level rise over the past four decades than any other glacier in Antarctica, and as a consequence has become one of its most intensively and extensively investigated ice stream systems.

However, different model projections of future mass loss give conflicting results; some suggesting mass loss could dramatically increase over the next few decades, resulting in a rapidly growing contribution to sea level, while others indicate a more moderate response.

Identifying which is the more likely behaviour is important for understanding future sea level rise and how this vulnerable part of Antarctica is going to evolve over the coming decades.

The results of the new study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, suggest that rapid migration of the grounding line, the place where the grounded ice first meets the ocean, is unlikely over that timescale, without a major change in ocean forcing. Instead, the results support model simulations that imply that the glacier will continue to lose mass but not at much greater rates than present.

Lead author Professor Jonathan Bamber from the University of Bristol’s School of Geographical Sciences, said: “This could seem like a ‘good news story’ but it’s important to remember that we still expect this glacier to continue to lose mass in the future and for that trend to increase over time, just not quite as fast as some model simulations suggested.

“It’s really important to understand why the models are producing different behaviour in the future and to get a better handle on how the glacier will evolve with the benefit of these new observations.

“In our study, we didn’t make projections but with the aid of these new data we can improve model projections for this part of Antarctica.”

DEEP DIVING SCIENTISTS DISCOVER “SODA SPRINGS” — AN UNDERWATER ENVIRONMENT WHERE HIGH CO2 CONCENTRATIONS (UP TO 95,000 PPM) BUBBLE-UP FROM THE OCEAN FLOOR

by Cap Allon, January 27, 2020 in Electroverse


University of Texas at Austin Professor, Bayani Cardenas, has discovered an underwater environment of bubbling carbon dioxide with readings some 200x the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Cardenas discovered the region –which he calls “Soda Springs”– while studying how groundwater from a nearby island could affect the ocean environment of the Verde Island Passage in the Philippines. The passage is one of the most diverse marine ecosystems in the world and is home to thriving coral reefs.

The amazing bubbling location, which Cardenas captured on video, is not a climate change nightmare, reads part of the press release issued by utexas.edu on Jan 22, 2020. It is instead linked to a nearby volcano that vents out the gases through cracks in the ocean floor, and has probably been doing so for decades or even millennia.

Continuer la lecture de DEEP DIVING SCIENTISTS DISCOVER “SODA SPRINGS” — AN UNDERWATER ENVIRONMENT WHERE HIGH CO2 CONCENTRATIONS (UP TO 95,000 PPM) BUBBLE-UP FROM THE OCEAN FLOOR

Jakarta is not an Exemplar of Sea Level Rise

by K. Hansen, January 25, 2020 in WUWT


Ted Nordhaus has an excellent article in the Wall Street Journal titled “Ignore the Fake Climate Debate”.

[  It may or may not be pay-walled for you — if it is, try searching the title in your search engine and use the link provided by Google/Bing/whatever — it may let you in or see here. ]

 

Jakarta, Indonesia, is not an exemplar of rising sea levels    

 Jakarta is a good proxy for many of the problems that Asian cities are having with sea levels — relative sea levels.   Is Relative Sea Level a problem specific to Asian cities?  No, but it is a common problem to Asian mega-cities as can be seen in this figure:

HISTORICAL DATA DESTROYS THE GLOBAL WARMING MYTH, AND PEOPLE ARE WAKING TO IT…

by Cap Allon, January 22, 2020 in Electroverse


According to NOAA’s own historical data, of the 50 U.S. state all-time record high temperatures, 23 were set during the 1930s, while 36 occurred prior to 1960 — climate change proponents are feeding us a fairy tale, and I’m sick of it…

The maniacal sociopaths of the world may have won control of the narrative, but they seemingly have little sway over the will of the people. You need only browse the comment section below any “climate change” article or social media post to see the wave of folks resoundingly rejecting the scam-of-a-world-view assembled before them (one of the few positives of SM).

The man-made global warming rejection is likely down to two things: the first being that the so called “scientific consensus” has been failing for far too long — you can’t start warning people in the 1980s that we have 10 years left to save the planet, only to keep repeating that prophecy for the next 4 decades. This is probably the reason our youth have become the new target — kids don’t have this history of failure to draw-upon when browsing the bullet points of the latest IPCC report -for example- meaning they’re far easier to manipulate.

 

NASA: 2020 Will Mark the Lowest Solar Activity in 200 Years

by James Murphy, January 16, 2020 in NewAmerican


With all of the pseudo-scientific propaganda being peddled about anthropogenic climate change, people sometimes forget that there are other, far more important drivers of the Earth’s climate than mankind’s carbon dioxide emissions. For example, that big ball of yellow light in the sky (aka the sun) has a huge effect on climate. And according to NASA, this year will mark the lowest level of solar activity in 200 years.

“Research now underway may have found a reliable new method to predict this solar activity. The Sun’s activity rises and falls in an 11-year cycle. The forecast for the next solar cycle says it will be the weakest of the last 200 years. The maximum of this next cycle — measured in terms of sunspot number, a standard measure of solar activity level — could be 30-50 percent lower than the most recent one. The results show that the next cycle will start in 2020 and reach its maximum in 2025.”

According to a growing number of scientists, the coming lower solar cycle — number 25 — may simply be a precursor to a period of prolonged solar minima such as the Maunder and Spörer minimums of the past millennium.

 

Major Greenland Glacier Is Growing

by NASA (Earth Observatory), June 6, 2019 in NASA.E.Observ.


Jakobshavn Glacier in western Greenland is notorious for being the world’s fastest-moving glacier. It is also one of the most active, discharging a tremendous amount of ice from the Greenland Ice Sheet into Ilulissat Icefjord and adjacent Disko Bay—with implications for sea level rise. The image above, acquired on June 6, 2019, by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8, shows a natural-color view of the glacier.

Jakobshavn has spent decades in retreat—that is, until scientists observed an unexpected advance between 2016 and 2017. In addition to growing toward the ocean, the glacier was found to be slowing and thickening. New data collected in March 2019 confirm that the glacier has grown for the third year in a row, and scientists attribute the change to cool ocean waters.

“The third straight year of thickening of Greenland’s biggest glacier supports our conclusion that the ocean is the culprit,” said Josh Willis, an ocean scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and principal investigator of the Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) mission

CHILLING 1200-YEAR-OLD VIKING STONE WARNS OF FUTURE LITTLE ICE AGES

by Cap Allon, January 18, 2020 in Electroverse


A secret code unsolved for 1200 years has finally been cracked — the mysterious inscription on famed Viking relic the Rök stone (or Rökstenen) reveals the warrior nation feared the return of the deadly ‘Late Antique Little Ice Age’ which wiped out more than HALF of Scandinavia — the stone speaks of an enduring battle against extreme cold weather in the sixth century.

According to a study led by Per Holmberg, a professor of Swedish language at the University of Gothenburg, the text is telling a tale of light and darkness, warmth and cold, and it expresses a deep fear of a coming climate disaster.

“The main theme is apparently the Sun, or the rhythm of light”, Holmberg explained.

Of the nine riddles contained on the stone, five of them have the answer “the Sun.”

 

The stone was erected in the late 800s near the lake Vattern in south central Sweden.

Throwing More Cold Water On An Alarmist Ocean-Warming Paper

by Dr. D. Whitehouse, January 17, 2020 in ClimateChangeDispatch


It’s the usual story. It’s the beginning of the year and the statistics of the previous year are hurriedly collected to tell the story of the ongoing climate crisis.

First off, we have the oceans which, according to some, are living up to the apocalyptic narrative better than the atmosphere.

The atmosphere is complicated, subjected to natural variabilities, that make the temperature increase open to too much interpretation.

The oceans, however, are far more important than the air as they absorb most of the anthropogenic excess heat.

Looking at the literature reveals no one knows just how much excess heat (created in the atmosphere) it mops up or indeed exactly how or where it does it. Some say it is 60% which is a bit on the low side, most say 90% or 93%.

The real figure is unknown though it should be noted that a few percent errors translate to a lot of energy, about the same amount that is causing all the concern.

On 14 January the Guardian had the headline, “Ocean temperatures hit record high as the rate of heating accelerates.” The study that reached this conclusion was published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.

It’s a badly written paper full of self-justifying statements and unwarranted assumptions that should have been stripped-out by the editor.

 

Also : Ocean Warming: Not As Simple As Headlines Say

Les Feux en Australie : la réalité des faits et rien d’autre…

by Yannick Colleu, 17 janvier 2020 in ScienceClimatEnergie


Les feux de brousse en Australie font la une des journaux écrits et audiovisuels. Ces annonces sont reprises par les réseaux sociaux.
La vérité médiatique est maintenant bien établie, ces feux sont l’œuvre du dérèglement climatique. Ces catastrophes humaine et écologique présagent, selon les réseaux dits sociaux, la fin du Monde annoncée par les « experts » du GIEC.

A ma connaissance pas un seul journaliste ne semble s’être penché sur le sujet. Du moins aucune autre conclusion, quant aux causes de cette catastrophe, n’a été, à ma connaissance, publiée sinon pour pointer le changement climatique comme seul et unique coupable.

Pourtant la réponse est moins évidente.

Il est de notoriété publique que l’Australie est un pays coutumier des sécheresses et des températures extrêmes. En outre c’est un pays quasi désertique de 7,7 millions de km² peuplé d’à peine 25 millions d’habitants principalement implantés dans les grandes villes de la côte Est et dans la principale métropole de l’Ouest.

Après les gigantesques feux de brousse de janvier à mars 1961 en Australie occidentale les réflexions sur les actions de prévention conduisaient à préconiser l’usage de feux déclenchés/contrôlés pour maîtriser la végétation à l’approche de la saison sèche. Cette technique permet en effet de créer des coupe-feux et de limiter la matière inflammable qui nourrit les brasiers.

Cette politique préventive a longtemps porté ses fruits, réduisant considérablement les incendies et surtout leur propagation. Néanmoins les chantres de la lutte contre le réchauffement et le CO2 ont poussé le gouvernement australien à changer de politique il y a une dizaine d’années (par exemple ici et ici).

La politique actuelle ne privilégie plus l’anticipation du risque d’incendie mais préconise de laisser les incendies se propager et de ne défendre autant faire se peut que les habitations et les vies humaines.
De fait la végétation n’est plus façonnée par l’homme pour limiter les risques de propagation et celle-ci offre dès lors un combustible abondant au moindre foyer qui se développe.

Le graphique ci-dessous fournit par l’association Bushfire Front Inc (BFF) de l’État d’Australie occidentale révèle l’impact que cet abandon d’une politique de prévention sur les feux de brousse sur la période 1950-2017.

En vert : surface de feux déclenchés.
En rouge : surface de feux de brousse

 

Source : https://www.bushfirefront.org.au/prescribed-burning/why-prescribed-burning/
Légende : La zone d’incendie contrôlé (réduction de ‘carburant’) est indiquée en vert et la zone des feux de brousse (feux de forêt) en rouge. Les pics causés par désastreuse saison des incendies de 1961 et les grands feux de brousse de ces dernières années sont clairement visibles.

2019 Alaska aerial survey found the most polar bears since 2012 – dozens of fat healthy bears

by Polar Bear Science, January 12, 2020 in WUWT


This aerial shot of six fat polar bears lolling around on a sand beach on the coast of the Southern Beaufort Sea, Alaska, was taken by NOAA employees in July 2019. It exemplifies the reality that bears in this subpopulation are currently abundant and healthy, negating the suggestion that numbers have continued to drop since 2006 because bears are starving.

The above picture of polar bear health is not an exception but the rule for all 31 bears recorded onshore last July, as the photos below from other locations testify. Those who would blame this abundance of bears on lack of sea ice in 2019 should note that ice retreated as early and as extensively in 2017 yet only 3 bears were spotted onshore. Results of a recent (2017-2018) population survey, which have not yet been made public, will of course not reflect conditions seen in 2019.

Canada’s Missing Heat: Stations Across The Country Show More Cooling Than Warming

by Kirye, January 12, 2020 in NoTricksZone


Global warming alarmists like claiming that a certain place is seeing more warming and climate change than everywhere else. Remarkably, they say that about almost everywhere, which of course makes no sense.

Today we look at Canadian temperature trends using the data from the Japan Meteorological Institute (JMA) for stations where they have data available going back to at least the mid 1990s.

First we look at December mean temperatures. What follows is a chart depicting the results of 9 stations across Canada:

 

 

Of the 9 examined stations, seven show no warming taking place at all in Canada over the past quarter century for the month of December. Data: JMA.