Archives par mot-clé : Fun?/Discussion

better to know...?, climate-debate

Corona-induced CO2 emission reductions are not yet detectable in the atmosphere

by Karlsruher Institut für Technology, Sep 21, 2020 in EurekAlert

Based on current data measured in the energy, industry, and mobility sectors, restrictions of social life during the corona pandemic can be predicted to lead to a reduction of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions by up to eight percent in 2020. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), cumulative reductions of about this magnitude would be required every year to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement by 2030. Recent measurements by researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) revealed that concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has not yet changed due to the estimated emission reductions. The results are reported in Remote Sensing (DOI: 10.3390/rs12152387).

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See also here =  Can We Measure a COVID-19-Related Slowdown in Atmospheric CO2 Growth? Sensitivity of Total Carbon Column Observations

better to know...?, climate-debate

A HISTORY OF CLIMATE FRAUD (I)

by Cap Allon, oct 5, 2020 in Electroverse

Much of the below analysis is courtesy of Kenneth Richard.

The combined Hadley Centre and Climatic Research Unit (HadCRUT) data set –which is featured in IPCC reports– underwent a revision from version 3 to version 4 in March of 2012, about a year before the next IPCC report was due.

At the time (early 2012), the HadCRUT3 was showing a slight global cooling trend between 1998 and 2012, visible in the graph below which uses HadCRUT3 and HadCRUT4 raw data. In conjunction with changing versions, the slight cooling trend had convenientlychanged to a slight warming trend:

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As recently as 1990, it was widely accepted that the global temperature trend showed a “0.5°C rise between 1880 and 1950”, as reported by NASA (Hansen and Lebedeff, 1987). This rise (as well as the 0.6C rise between 1880 and 1940) can clearly be seen in the NASA GISS graph from 1987:

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climate-debate

Michael Mann Appeals to, Then Ignores Scientific Consensus on 60 Minutes

by James Taylor, Oct 5, 2020 in WUWT

Prominent scientist and climate activist Michael Mann appealed to an asserted scientific consensus to chastise President Donald Trump on CBS’s 60 Minutes program last night. Ironically, Mann himself ignored clear scientific consensus in order to promote his own, out-of-the-mainstream climate change theories.

While interviewing Mann, CBS’s Scott Pelley said, “There have always been fires in the West. There have always been hurricanes in the East. How do we know that climate change is involved in this?” Pelley followed up with, “The president says about climate change, ‘Science doesn’t know.’”

Replied Mann, “The president doesn’t know, and he should know better. He should know that the world’s leading scientific organizations, our own U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and national academies of every major industrial nation, every scientific society in the United States that’s weighed in on the matter. This is a scientific consensus. There’s about as much scientific consensus about human-caused climate change as there is about gravity.”

Mann’s description of the conclusions of the “scientific consensus” however, is exactly the opposite of what scientific bodies report.

As documented in Climate at a Glance: Hurricanes, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) expresses “low confidence” in any connection between climate change and changes in hurricane activity.

Similarly, as documented in Climate at a Glance: U.S. Wildfires, U.S. wildfires are much less frequent and severe than they were in the first half of the 20th century – 100 years of global warming ago. Moreover, the IPCC reports a decrease in drought conditions – which is the primary climate factor regarding wildfires – in the global region including the U.S. West. Moreover, the IPCC finds no evidence of an increase in drought globally, either.

Ultimately, data, evidence, and scientific facts are far more indicative of scientific truth than a real or imagined consensus of scientists. Yet, to the extent Michael Mann wishes to invoke consensus as a scientific argument, the clear consensus of scientists is that Mann is promoting extreme climate theories that have no basis in reality.

better to know...?, climate-debate

Restoring Scientific Debate on Climate

by Jim Steele, Oct 3, 2020 in WUWT

The political genius of Abraham Lincoln’s efforts to unify the country during America’s most divisive time has been attributed to assembling a “team of rivals”. Likewise, scientific research is published so rivals and supporters of a hypothesis can independently and critically examine it. The great benefits of a team of rivals is also the basis for convening red team/blue team debates.

In 2017, Dr Steve Koonin, a physicist who served as Obama’s Undersecretary for Science in the US Department of Energy, urged convening red-team blue-team debates for climate science in his article A ‘Red Team’ Exercise Would Strengthen Climate Science.  “The national-security community pioneered the “Red Team” methodology to test assumptions and analyses, identify risks, and reduce—or at least understand—uncertainties. The process is now considered a best practice in high-consequence situations”.

Unfortunately, the public climate science debate has been framed as “deniers” versus “alarmists”, or “honest saintly scientists” versus “corrupt perpetrators of a hoax”.  The media pushes exaggerated claims of a crisis while some scientists misleadingly shield their hypotheses claiming the “science is settled”.  But science is a process and never settled. However, all sides do agree carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and concentrations have increased. All sides agree the climate is changing. That science is indeed settled. But complex climate dynamics are not driven solely by CO2 and many unsettled questions remain.  Scientists still debate whether climate has a higher or lower sensitivity to rising CO2. Answering that question depends on the unsettled science regards competing contributions from natural variability and landscape changes. And because rising CO2 and warmth benefits photosynthesizing plants, scientists debate the beneficial contributions of rising CO2.

Climate models could not replicate recent warming when only natural climate change was considered. But models could simulate recent warming since 1970s after adding CO2. That was the only evidence that supported the notion that increasing CO2 caused observed warming. However, there’s a flaw in such reasoning. Models limited to just natural climate dynamics failed to explain recent changes simply because our understanding is still incomplete. For example the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a major driver of natural climate change was only recently characterized in 1997, but has been shown to account for 100 years of changing climate along the coasts of the north eastern Pacific.

 

Urban Heat Island profile Image from Lawrence Berkeley Labs

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better to know...?, climate-debate

11 SCIENTIFIC PREDICTIONS FOR THE UPCOMING GRAND SOLAR MINIMUM

by Cap Allon, Sep 18, 2020 in Electroverse

 There is ever-mounting evidence warning the next epoch will be one of sharp terrestrial cooling due to a relative flat-lining of solar output.

The exact time-frame and depth of this next chill of solar minimum is still anyone’s guess, and the parameters involved (i.e., galactic cosmic rays, geomagnetic activity, solar wind flux etc.) remain poorly understood. However, there are some great minds on the job, and below I’ve collated 11 best-guesses based on published scientific papers from respected researchers in the field. The list begins with eminent Russian astrophysicist K. Abdussamatov–though it is in no particular order.

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climate-debate

Global Warming Drives Wildfires Study–Ignores Pre 1979 Data

by P. Homewood, Sep 25, 2020 in WUWT

Climate change is driving the scale and impact of recent wildfires that have raged in California, say scientists.

Their analysis finds an “unequivocal and pervasive” role for global heating in boosting the conditions for fire.

California now has greater exposure to fire risks than before humans started altering the climate, the authors say.

Land management issues, touted by President Donald Trump as a key cause, can’t by themselves explain the recent infernos.

The new review covers more than 100 studies published since 2013, and shows that extreme fires occur when natural variability in the climate is superimposed on increasingly warm and dry background conditions resulting from global warming.

“In terms of the trends we’re seeing, in terms of the extent of wildfires, and which have increased eight to ten-fold in the past four decades, that trend is driven by climate change,” said Dr Matthew Jones from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, who led the review.

“Climate change ultimately means that those forests, whatever state they’re in, are becoming warmer and drier more frequently,” he told BBC News.

“And that’s what’s really driving the kind of scale and impact of the fires that we’re seeing today.”

In the 40 years from 1979 to 2019, fire weather conditions have increased by a total of eight days on average across the world.

However, in California the number of autumn days with extreme wildfire conditions has doubled in that period.

The authors of the review conclude that “climate change is bringing hotter, drier weather to the western US and the region is fundamentally more exposed to fire risks than it was before humans began to alter the global climate”.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-54278988

Now why should they start their study in 1979? After all, there is loads of data from earlier years.

A look at NOAA’s rainfall graph for California shows just why:

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/national/time-series

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climate and geology

Scientists Find Peak 1940s Warmth, Post-1950s Cooling In The Same Western US Region Where Hockey Sticks Emerged

by K. Richard, Sep 24, 2020 in NoTricksZone

A new 1735-2015 temperature reconstruction (Heeter et al., 2020) using Western US tree ring proxies shows peak 1940s warmth and post-1950s cooling. This is the same region Dr. Michael Mann used tree ring data to construct his famous hockey stick graph.

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A new Scandinavian temperature reconstruction (Seftigen et al., 2020) that’s “skillfull in characterizing past temperature changes over the past one to two millennia” finds there

better to know...?, climate-debate

CLINTEL puts hard climate questions to Bill Gates

by D. Wojick, Sep 23, 2020 in CFACT

Bill Gates is throwing several billion dollars at climate change. Mind you he is not throwing it away, because it is mostly venture capital for new energy technologies, which could pay off handsomely without climate change.

Gates can do what he likes with his riches, but he is a leading figure and lately he has become a serious climate change scaremonger. This has prompted CLINTEL to put some hard questions to him, in the form of a registered letter.

On the scaremongering side, last month Gates published an article claiming that climate change will be far worse than the present Covid outbreak. He imagines many millions dying from climate change. The press spread his doomsday words far and wide.

Here are some doomful excerpts:

“I am talking about COVID-19. But in just a few decades, the same description will fit another global crisis: climate change. As awful as this pandemic is, climate change could be worse.“

“I realize that it’s hard to think about a problem like climate change right now. When disaster strikes, it is human nature to worry only about meeting our most immediate needs, especially when the disaster is as bad as COVID-19. But the fact that dramatically higher temperatures seem far off in the future does not make them any less of a problem—and the only way to avoid the worst possible climate outcomes is to accelerate our efforts now. Even as the world works to stop the novel coronavirus and begin recovering from it, we also need to act now to avoid a climate disaster by building and deploying innovations that will let us eliminate our greenhouse gas emissions.”

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better to know...?, energy and fields, minerals and ores

Censored: Australian scientists say suppression of environment research is getting worse

by D. Lewis, Sep 21, 2020 in Nature

Environmental scientists in Australia say that they are under increasing pressure from their employers to downplay research findings or avoid communicating them at all. More than half of the respondents to an online survey thought that constraints on speaking publicly on issues such as threatened species, urban development, mining, logging and climate change had become worse in recent years.1

The findings, published this month in Conservation Letters, reflect how politicized debates about environmental policy in Australia have become, says Saul Cunningham, an environmental scientist at the Australian National University in Canberra. “We need our publicly funded institutions to be more vocal in defending the importance of an independent voice based on research,” he says.

Australian scientists aren’t the only ones who have reported interference in science or pressure — particularly from government employers — to downplay research findings. Scientists in the United States, Canada and Brazil have also reported such intrusions in the past decade.

Scale of the problem

Two-hundred and twenty scientists in Australia responded to the survey, which was organized by the Ecological Society of Australia and ran from October 2018 until February 2019. Some of the respondents worked in government, others in universities or in industry, for example in environmental consultancies or non-governmental organizations.

The results show that government and industry scientists experienced greater constraints from their employers than did university staff. Among government employees, about half were prohibited from speaking publicly about their research, compared with 38% employed in industry and 9% of university staff. Three-quarters of those surveyed also reported self-censoring their work.

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climate and geology

Que nous apprend l’Optimum Climatique Romain?

by A. Préat, 4 septembre 2020 in ScienceClimatEnergie

1/ Introduction

SCE a plusieurs fois rapporté que la période actuelle de réchauffement n’est pas exceptionnelle, qu’elle fait partie de cycles décennaux à pluriséculaires de refroidissement et réchauffement qui ont lieu dans des fourchettes de température fort modestes, de l’ordre de 0,15°C par 10 ans. SCE a aussi montré que le CO2 tant incriminé dans ces changements, et surtout l’actuel, n’avait pas de raison d’être, ce gaz venant après l’augmentation de température. Le ‘bouton CO2 ‘ à même d’expliquer ou de ‘justifier’ le battage médiatique quasi-quotidien est donc à ‘la remorque’ de la température et, l’hypothèse de l’effet de serre reste avant tout une hypothèse (exemple ici).

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climate-debate

The Dirty Dozen Tests Of Global Warming Science

by G.H. Sherrington, Sep 11, 2020 in WUWT

Assume for discussion that there has been a change of 1⁰C in the customary global near-surface air temperature, GAST, over the last century. There have been many assertions that this has produced changes. The strength of assertions is greater when a mathematical relation between temperature and the alleged change is established. Here are some relationships to ponder, for the last century or for a significant or available shorter time.

For a 1⁰C change in global temperature –

  1. By how many millimeters does the sea level surface height change?

  2. By how many ppm does atmospheric CO₂ change?

  3. By how many tonnes does the weight of terrestrial vegetation, like forests, change?

  4. By how much does the pH of the oceans change?

  5. By how many sq km does the average area of cloud cover change?

  6. What change is there to the accumulated cyclone index, ACE?

  7. What is the net change to the globalnumber of –

    1. Birds
    1. Land animals
    1. Marine algae

  8. By how many Watt per square metre does the Top of Atmosphere TOA radiation balance change?

  9. By how many tonnes does the weight of ice change –

    1. Over land
    1. Floating on sea
    1. Grounded over sea

  10. By how much does total precipitable rainfall TPW change?

  11. By what number does the number of large bush fires change?

 

By how many tonnes do yields of major food crops change, expressed as tonnes available per person, for example

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climate and geology

“NEW LITTLE ICE AGE INSTEAD OF GLOBAL WARMING?” BY DR THEODOR LANDSCHEIDT

by Cap Allon, September 7, 2020 in Electroverse

Among the long list or scientific papers suggesting that a solar-driven spell of global cooling is on the cards, Dr Theodor Landscheidt’s ‘New Little ICE Age Instead of Global Warming?‘ probably has the claim of priority.

Published in 2003, just a year before his death, Landscheidt’s research is standing the test of time, and is still largely on course to be proved correct.

The paper’s abstract begins:

‘Analysis of the sun’s varying activity in the last two millennia indicates that contrary to the IPCC’s speculation about man-made global warming as high as 5.8C within the next hundred years, a long period of cool climate with its coldest phase around 2030 is to be expected.’

Crucially, in the growing list of research concluding that a solar-driven multidecadal spell of global cooling is on the cards (research from multiple studies of quite different characteristics), the year 2030 ALWAYS features prominently. Unlike the IPCC, which tosses its thermageddon doomsday date back and forth like a hot potato, researchers who track the multimillennial plays of the cosmos (namely those of the Sun) routinely land on the year 2030 as being the date of ‘climate deterioration’: this in itself should serve as compelling evidence.

Dr Landscheidt continues:

‘It is shown that minima in the 80 to 90-year Gleissberg cycle of solar activity, coinciding with periods of cool climate on Earth, are consistently linked to an 83-year cycle in the change of the rotary force driving the sun’s oscillatory motion … As the future course of this cycle and its amplitudes can be computed, it can be seen that the Gleissberg minimum around 2030 and another one around 2200 will be of the Maunder minimum type accompanied by severe cooling on Earth. This forecast should prove skillful as other long-range forecasts of climate phenomena, based on cycles in the sun’s orbital motion, have turned out correct as for instance the prediction of the last three El Niño years before the respective event.’

Dr Landscheidt concludes his introduction with the IPCC’s position on global warming, and he points to a growing list of publications showing a solar-climate connection:

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climate-debate

CNN Falsely Blames Climate Change For Siberian Craters

by A. Watts, September 6, 2020 in ClimateChangeDispatch

The phrase “never let a potential climate crisis story go to waste” must be in CNN’s news handbook because this headline has absolutely nothing to do with global warming aka climate change.

The story at CNN titled Massive mystery holes appear in Siberian tundra — and could be linked to climate change is a red herring of the smelliest kind because if the writer Katie Hunt had bothered to do even the simplest of web searches, she would have learned that this crater, peculiar to that part of Siberia, is called a Pingo.

It has been known to western academics since 1825, ruling out the paranoia of “climate change” in recent decades as the cause.

In fact, all Katie had to do was look at Wikipedia for the answer:

Pingos are intrapermafrost ice-cored hills, ranging in height from 3 to 70 m (10 to 230 ft) and 30 to 1,000 m (98 to 3,281 ft) in diameter. They are typically conical in shape and grow and persist only in permafrost environments, such as the Arctic and subarctic.

A pingo is a periglacial landform, which is defined as a non-glacial landform or process linked to colder climates. It is estimated that there are more than 11,000 pingos on Earth. The Tuktoyaktuk peninsula area has the greatest concentration of pingos in the world with a total of 1,350 pingos.

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climate-debate

Sceptical covid-19 research and sceptical polar bear science: is there a difference?

by Polar Bear Science, September 6, 2020

This essay about medical researchers having trouble getting their papers published because the results don’t support the official pandemic narrative has disturbing parallels with my experience trying to inject some balance into the official polar bear conservation narrative.1 Especially poignant is the mention of models built on assumptions sold as ‘facts’ that fail once data (i.e. evidence) become available – which of course is the entire point of my latest book, The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened.

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Read the commentary below, copied from Lockdownsceptics.org (6 September 2020). Bold in original, link added to the story to which this is a response, and brief notes and links added as footnotes for parallels with polar bear conservation science.

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better to know...?, minerals and ores, pollution-contamination, renewable energy

Mining For Green-Energy Materials Threatens Biodiversity, Study Shows

by O. Rudgard, September 3, 2020 in ClimateChaneDispatch

Mining for renewable energy materials could threaten biodiversity, researchers have found.

Scientists at the University of Queensland, Brisbane found a high degree of overlap between areas used for mining essential minerals like lithium, which is used for car batteries, and areas with high levels of biodiversity as yet untouched by industry.

Conservationists are “often naive to the threats posed by significant growth in renewable energies”, the researchers said in the study published in the journal Nature Communications, pointing out that 14 percent of protected areas contain metal mines or have them nearby.

Overall, the researchers found that eight percent of mining areas were within the range of areas designated as protected by national governments, and seven percent were within the same range of key biodiversity areas.

Using this metric, 50 million square kilometers of the earth’s land surface is influenced by mining, with 82 percent of mining areas focused on elements needed for renewable energy production.

Elements including lithium, cobalt, and nickel are essential for rechargeable batteries, which are used for power storage in wind and solar projects, as well as in electric cars.

New mines are planned to target these substances, adding to the global surface area covered by mining activities.

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climate-debate

Challenging IChemE climate scaremongering

by D.  Wojick, September 2, 2020 in WUWT

The Institution for Chemical Engineers (IChemE) is a prestigious international group of scientists and professionals with over 35,000 members in about 100 countries. IChemE has been conducting what it calls a consultation on its draft Position Statement on Climate Change. This basically means that the members are invited to submit comments. Given that many engineers are skeptical of the climate scare, it will be interesting to see if all of these comments are made public.

The draft statement itself is pure alarmism. They say the science is settled, per the IPCC, and catastrophe looms. Here is the opening paragraph:

“Climate science is established – global climate change is upon us, exacerbated by human activities. IChemE accepts the veracity of the science and its conclusions published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). To avoid irreparable social, economic and environmental damage, it is essential that we accelerate our efforts to decarbonize our economic systems and stabilize the levels of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere, if we are to have any chance of limiting the global average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C, beyond which catastrophic consequences are more likely. Action needs to be global and fair, recognizing the relative differences between regions, both in terms of historic contributions to emissions and vulnerability to the consequences of a warming planet.

Chemical engineers are uniquely placed to take action in the industries that contribute to greenhouse gas emissions to arrest and reverse the damage we humans are doing to the life support systems of our single, shared planet .” (Emphasis added).

Not only do they simply sing the IPCC song, they even get it wrong. Nowhere does the IPCC suggest that 1.5 degrees of warming (with one degree already on their books) is a threshold to catastrophe. In fact the Paris Accord target is still 2.0 degrees. The last sentence may explain IChemE’s fervent catastrophism. Its members are positioned to make huge sums of money doing the engineering to decarbonize the world. After all, CO2 emissions are typically the product of chemical reactions (including combustion).

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better to know...?, climate-debate

About That Sharp Rise in Climate Concern

by Donna Laframboise, September 2, 2020 in BigPicturesNews

Poll sponsors say climate attitudes have been ‘remarkably consistent’ over two decades.

A few days ago, Scientific American reprinted an article straight from Climatewire. Titled Republican Convention Ignored Climate Threat, But Americans’ Attitudes Are Shifting, it says “Polling shows that voter concern about climate change has been growing for years and that it has not diminished as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.” We’re then told about a recent public opinion survey affiliated with Stanford University.

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climate-debate

Debunking Popular Climate Myths About CO2

by N. Thorner, October 25, 2019 in ClimateChangeDispatch

If you believe the debate over global warming has ever been about science—or for that matter climate—you have been conditioned, through formal education or through reports warning of doom and gloom, to believe what others rightly describe as a world-wide hoax concocted to unite the world under a single socialistic government where there is no capitalism, no democracy, and no freedom.

Why is exposing the truth so important? Because it has everything to do with the redistribution of wealth and the establishment of political agendas aimed at destroying the foundation of eastern democracies and free markets.

Accordingly, it is therefore critical for everyone to become informed so free and open debate can exist, rather than the suppression and falsification of actual scientific climate data.

This article will expose some of the popular climate myths about CO2, so the reader will be equipped with ammunition to spread the truth to those who are willing to listen and have not yet become environmental extremists.

Links are included after each myth to substantiate information and to provide reference material for further interest and clarification.

The article was written using individual articles, with permission from my friend Jay Lehr, Ph.D., in which he exposed popular climate myths related to CO2. Jay Lehr is a Senior Policy Analyst for The International Climate Science Coalition.

Myth #1:  Carbon dioxide emissions cause catastrophic global warming.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

When will Temperatures start to fall? Part1

by Tony Brown, August 28, 2020 in WUWT

“If Europeans truly mobilize around the delivery of the 2050 goal, every business decision, lifestyle choice, political swing, every hallmark of European culture — from annual ski trips, to Champions League Football matches, to French cheese — will need to be tested against its contribution to climate change.” European Commission ‘Green Deal’ March 2020

This is an article with a simple proposition.  Science tells us that rapidly rising Co2 in turn causes rising temperatures, which has become a very serious problem for humanity.

The three questions I ask, in the expectation that the answer can be provided from main stream published science is;

“Assuming we reach zero carbon emissions by 2030-Extinction Rebellion (XR) requirement,  or 2050 -the aim of most governments under the Paris Accord- 1) how long would it take for Co2 levels to naturally fall below the’ safe upper limits’ of 350ppm espoused by such as James Hansen; 2) for it to fall further to 280ppm -the previous pre industrial level -AND 3) when will temperatures start to fall in turn, to achieve pre industrial levels, said to be 1 to 2 degrees Centigrade below present, according to the IPCC.”

There are all sorts of caveats of course, with methane, water vapour, clouds, feedbacks, ocean response, natural variations etc but having scoured various ‘official’ web sites I can find no definitive estimate. An examination of the Extinction Rebellion web site demonstrates they are anarchists, rather than a serious green organisation. A couple of more reasoned attempts to track the consequences of zero carbon emissions are given in Note 3below the graphic-Figure 1 together with a variety of other useful background information.

Whether the reader personally believes excess Co2 to be a problem is not a matter this article is concerned with.  Let’s take science at face value –our respective Governments  have overwhelmingly agreed that humanity has added some 140ppm of Co2 to the pre industrial 280ppm and that, as a result, temperatures have risen substantially and are at a dangerous level and causing extremes of weather.

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climate-debate

New confirmation that climate models overstate atmospheric warming

by Dr. Judith Curry, August 27, 2020 in WUWT

Reposted from Dr. Judith Curry’s Climate Etc.

Posted on August 25, 2020

by Ross McKitrick

Two new peer-reviewed papers from independent teams confirm that climate models overstate atmospheric warming and the problem has gotten worse over time, not better.

The papers are Mitchell et al. (2020) “The vertical profile of recent tropical temperature trends: Persistent model biases in the context of internal variability” Environmental Research Letters, and McKitrick and Christy (2020) “Pervasive warming bias in CMIP6 tropospheric layers” Earth and Space Science. John and I didn’t know about the Mitchell team’s work until after their paper came out, and they likewise didn’t know about ours.

Mitchell et al. look at the surface, troposphere and stratosphere over the tropics (20N to 20S). John and I look at the tropical and global lower- and mid- troposphere. Both papers test large samples of the latest generation (“Coupled Model Intercomparison Project version 6” or CMIP6) climate models, i.e. the ones being used for the next IPCC report, and compare model outputs to post-1979 observations. John and I were able to examine 38 models while Mitchell et al. looked at 48 models. The sheer number makes one wonder why so many are needed, if the science is settled. Both papers looked at “hindcasts,” which are reconstructions of recent historical temperatures in response to observed greenhouse gas emissions and other changes (e.g. aerosols and solar forcing). Across the two papers it emerges that the models overshoot historical warming from the near-surface through the upper troposphere, in the tropics and globally.

Mitchell et al. 2020

Mitchell et al. had, in an earlier study, examined whether the problem is that the models amplify surface warming too much as you go up in altitude, or whether they get the vertical amplification right but start with too much surface warming. The short answer is both.

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unclassified

No Fuel, No Fire

by Mike Jonas, August 25, 2020 in WUWT

With wildfires devastating California, it may be worth while seeing if lessons can be learned from Australia. Connections between American and Australian firefighters go back many years, with each helping the other from time to time. There were devastating bushfires in Australia last summer, and, tragically, three Americans who had come to help were killed when their water tanker plane crashed. It’s now Australia’s turn to help California, and let us all hope there is a better outcome.

Gum trees burnt in the bushfires in The Blue Mountains in Australia

Submissions to Enquiries

Australia’s federal enquiry into the bushfires is not due to report until 28 October 2020 but the NSW [New South Wales] state enquiry report was published today. There were nearly 2,000 public submissions. Before I go into the report’s recommendations, it may be worth looking at a couple of the public submissions in order to understand the extreme level of public frustration with green tape and the way that the fire hazard has been allowed to grow ever larger over the years.

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climate-debate

PBS Blames Hurricanes, Wildfires On Climate Change, Defying UN ‘Consensus’

by H.S. Burnett, August 20, 2020 in ClimateChangeDispatch

PBS News Hour attacked climate science this weekend, publishing alarmist claims about hurricanes and wildfires that defy findings of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In an interview between PBS reporter Hari Sreenivasan and Andrew Freedman, editor of Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang, the two journalists blamed global warming for severe wildfires and hurricanes.

According to the IPCC, however, there is little or no evidence indicating global warming is impacting hurricanes or drought.

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Figure 1: Total wildfire acreage burned by year in the United States, 1926 to 2019. Data from NIFC. Graph by meteorologist Anthony Watts

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climate-debate

Stop Blaming Climate Change For California’s Fires–Michael Schellenberger

by P. Homewood, August 26, 2020 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

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It’s Not About The Climate

Nobody denies climate change is occurring and playing a role in warmer temperatures and heatwaves. Keeley notes that, since 1960, the variation in spring and summer temperatures explain 50% of the variation in fire frequency and intensity from one year to the next.

But the half-century since 1960 is the same period in which the U.S. government promoted, mostly out of ignorance, the suppression of regular fires which most forests need to allow for new growth.

For much of the 20th Century, U.S. agencies and private landowners suppressed fires as a matter of policy. The results were disastrous: the accumulation of wood fuel resulting in fires that burn so hot they sometimes kill the forest, turning it into shrubland.

The US government started to allow forests in national parks to burn more in the 1960s, and allowed a wider set of forests on public lands to burn starting in the 1990s.

“When I hear climate change discussed it’s suggested that it’s a major reason and it’s not,” Scott Stevens of the University of California, Berkeley, told me.

Redwood forests before Europeans arrived burned every 6 to 25 years. The evidence comes from fire scars on barks and the bases of massive ancient trees, hollowed out by fire, like the one depicted in The New York Times photograph.

“There was severe heat before the lightning that dried-out [wood] fuel,” noted Stevens. “But in Big Basin [redwood park], where fire burned every seven to ten years, there is a high-density of fuel build-up, especially in the forests.”

climate-debate

Scientists: It’s ‘Impossible’ To Measure Critical Cloud Processes…Observations 1/50th As Accurate As They Must Be

by K. Richard, August 20, 2020 in NoTricksZone

Clouds dominate as the driver of changes in the Earth’s radiation budget and climate. A comprehensive new analysis suggests we’re so uncertain about cloud processes and how they affect climate we can’t even quantify our uncertainty. 

According to scientists (Song et al., 2016), the total net forcing for Earth’s oceanic atmospheric greenhouse effect (Gaa) during 1992-2014 amounted to -0.04 W/m² per year. In other words, the trend in total longwave forcing had a net negative (cooling) influence during those 22 years despite a 42 ppm increase in CO2. This was primarily due to the downward trend in cloud cover that overwhelmed or “offset” the longwave influence from CO2.

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Cloud impacts on climate are profound – but so are uncertainties

The influence of clouds profoundly affects Earth’s radiation budget, easily overwhelming CO2’s impact within the greeenhouse effect. This has been acknowledged by scientists for decades.

Despite the magnitude of clouds’ radiative impact on climate, scientists have also pointed out that our limited capacity to observe or measure cloud effects necessarily results in massive uncertainties.

For example, Stephens et al. (2012) estimated the uncertainty in Earth’s annual longwave surface fluxes is ±9 W/m² (~18 W/m²) primarily due to the uncertainties associated with cloud longwave radiation impacts.

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