Archives par mot-clé : Fun?/Discussion

climate-debate

More On Earth’s Meaningless Global Temperature, Now And Before

by J. Moseley, March 9, 2020 in ClimateChangeDispatch

Is planet Earth warming, cooling, or staying the same? I often challenge advocates for climate alarmism: what is the temperature of the planet today?

Or we can use any specific day in recent years for which data are available. We cannot know the temperature of the planet thousands or millions of years ago if we cannot even measure it today.

Yes, the question is one single temperature of the entire planet. Not the temperature in Nome, Alaska, or Dallas, Texas, or Sydney, Australia, or in your hometown.

One single temperature reading for the entire globe. To put it that way immediately sounds strange.

But if we don’t have a single temperature reading for the entire planet for today, how can we say if the planet is getting warmer or cooler or not changing at all?

We cannot talk about the temperature in, say, Geneva or London or New York City only. The question is whether the entire planet is getting warmer, not isolated cities.

Some of us have forgotten basic statistics. Some avoided it in school. But most of us are vaguely familiar with the random sampling process used in public opinion surveys.

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climate-debate

A Skeptic’s Guide To Global Temperatures

by Clive Best, August 30, 2019 in ClimateChangeDispatch

Climate change may well turn out to be a benign problem rather than the severe problem or “emergency” it is claimed to be.

This will eventually depend on just how much the Earth’s climate is warming due to our transient but relatively large increase in atmospheric CO2 levels.

This is why it is so important to accurately and impartially measure the Earth’s average temperature rise since 1850. It turns out that such a measurement is neither straightforward, independent, nor easy.

For some climate scientists, there sometimes appears to be a slight temptation to exaggerate recent warming,  perhaps because their careers and status improve the higher temperatures rise.

They are human like the rest of us. Similarly, the green energy lobby welcomes each scarier temperature increase to push ever more funding for their unproven solutions, without ever really explaining how they could possibly work better than a rapid expansion in nuclear energy instead.

Despite over 30 years of strident warnings and the fairly successful efforts of G7 countries to actually reduce emissions, CO2 levels in the atmosphere are still stubbornly accelerating upwards.

This is because simultaneously the developing world has strived to raise the wellbeing and living standards of their large populations through the use of ever more coal and oil, exactly as we did.

This is our current dilemma. Should they somehow be stopped from burning fossil fuels, or maybe compensated financially to ‘transition’ to so-called renewable energy instead?

All this again depends on the speed of climate change, which simply translates to the slope of the temperature record.

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climate-debate

There’s No Such Thing As The Earth’s Ideal Temperature

By Jerry Powlas, March 2, 2020 in ClimateChangeDispatch

“The temperature of the Earth” is an ambiguous term that cannot mean anything.

At any given time, it is possible to measure the temperature of some very small part of the Earth, such as, perhaps, a shot glass of water.

At that same moment, other temperatures of the Earth that could be measured will show a variation from the temperature of molten rock (1,300 to 2,200°F) to polar ice (32 to -76°F).

Daily variation of the same place on Earth can be 50 to 60°F. Seasonal variation can be well over 100°F in high latitudes.

Conceptually, we could imagine, but not actually measure, every possible place and thing, at every possible time through all the seasons, and then average these data.

To detect “global warming,” we would have to modify these data to include the specific heat of everything measured, as well as the latent heat of all the things that change phase such as water, which appears as a liquid, vapor, and ice.

Conceptually, yes; actually, no. Not possible.

Atmospheric science is presumably the scientific study of the atmosphere. (I am proudly not an atmospheric scientist.) If you use the scientific method to study something, you might presume to call yourself a scientist.

Calling yourself a scientist does not give you the privilege of using bad data to reach fuzzy conclusions and then scare people with the latter.

These folks are looking for about a 1°C change in “the temperature of the Earth” over the course of 100 years.

 

 

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climate-debate

NOAA Relies on ‘Russian Collusion’ to Claim January Was Hottest Month on Record

by Anthony Watts, February 29, 2020 in WUWT

In a report generating substantial media attention this month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) claimed January 2020 was the hottest January on record. In reality, the claim relies on substantial speculation, dubious reporting methods, and a large, very suspicious, extremely warm reported heat patch covering most of Russia.

The January 2020 Climate Assessment Report, released by NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information (NCEI), was accompanied by a map showing a giant red menace of extraordinary asserted warmth extending from the Russian border with Poland well into Siberia. Yet, the asserted hot spot appears nowhere else.

 

Figure 1: Map of temperature departure provided by NOAA/NCEII. Note the huge red spot over Russia.

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climate-debate, unclassified

Tendency, Convenient Mistakes, and the Importance of Physical Reasoning.

by Pat Frank, March 1, 2020 in WUWT

Last February 7, statistician Richard Booth, Ph.D. (hereinafter, Rich) posted a very long critique titled, What do you mean by “mean”: an essay on black boxes, emulators, and uncertainty” which is very critical of the GCM air temperature projection emulator in my paper. He was also very critical of the notion of predictive uncertainty itself.

This post critically assesses his criticism.

An aside before the main topic. In his critique, Rich made many of the same mistakes in physical error analysis as do climate modelers. I have described the incompetence of that guild at WUWT here and here.

Rich and climate modelers both describe the probability distribution of the output of a model of unknown physical competence and accuracy, as being identical to physical error and predictive reliability.

Their view is wrong.

Unknown physical competence and accuracy describes the current state of climate models (at least until recently. See also Anagnostopoulos, et al. (2010), Lindzen & Choi (2011), Zanchettin, et al., (2017), and Loehle, (2018)).

GCM climate hindcasts are not tests of accuracy, because GCMs are tuned to reproduce hindcast targets. For example, here, here, and here. Tests of GCMs against a past climate that they were tuned to reproduce is no indication of physical competence.

When a model is of unknown competence in physical accuracy, the statistical dispersion of its projective output cannot be a measure of physical error or of predictive reliability.

Ignorance of this problem entails the very basic scientific mistake that climate modelers evidently strongly embrace and that appears repeatedly in Rich’s essay. It reduces both contemporary climate modeling and Rich’s essay to scientific vacancy.

The correspondence of Rich’s work with that of climate modelers reiterates something I realized after much immersion in published climatology literature — that climate modeling is an exercise in statistical speculation. Papers on climate modeling are almost entirely statistical conjectures. Climate modeling plays with physical parameters but is not a branch of physics.

I believe this circumstance refutes the American Statistical Society’s statement that more statisticians should enter climatology. Climatology doesn’t need more statisticians because it already has far too many: the climate modelers who pretend at science. Consensus climatologists play at scienceness and can’t discern the difference between that and the real thing.

Climatology needs more scientists. Evidence suggests many of the good ones previously resident have been caused to flee.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Why are polar bears going extinct? (Spoiler: They’re not)

by S. Crockford, February 24, 2020 in WUWT

Google says many people ask this question so here is the correct answer: polar bears are not going extinct. If you have been told that, you have misunderstood or have been misinformed. Polar bears are well-distributed across their available habitat and population numbers are high (officially 22,000-31,000 at 2015 but likely closer to 26,000-58,000 at 2018): these are features of a healthy, thriving species. ‘Why are polar bears going extinct?’ contains a false premise – there is no need to ask ‘why’ when the ‘polar bears [are] going extinct’ part is not true.1

mother-with-cubs-russia_shutterstock_71694292_web-size-e1582489285608

It is true that in 2007, it was predicted that polar bear numbers would plummet when summer sea ice declined to 42% of 1979 levels for 8 out of 10 years (anticipated to occur by 2050) and extinct or nearly so by 2100 (Amstrup et al. 2007). However, summer sea ice has been at ‘mid-century-like’ levels since 2007 (with year to year variation, see NOAA ice chart below) yet polar bear numbers have increased since 2005. The anticipated disaster did not occur but many people still believe it did because the media and some researchers still give that impression.

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unclassified

La péninsule Antarctique se porte bien

by P. Berth, 28 février 2020 in ScienceClimatEnergie

Selon un récent article du Guardian, des scientifiques ont mesuré pour la première fois la température de 20,75°C le 9 février 2020 sur l’île Seymour, une île située au large de la péninsule Antarctique. Cette île comporte la station de mesure Marambio où les relevés ont été réalisés. Bien entendu, cette nouvelle a été reprise par les médias, Greta Thunberg en tête. Cependant, en analysant objectivement la situation vous pourrez constater qu’il n’y a pas lieu de s’alarmer.

1. Localisation de l’île Seymour et température moyenne annuelle

L’île Seymour est située au large de la péninsule Antarctique (Figure 1), la région la plus au nord du continent Antarctique et, quasiment, la seule partie d’Antarctique s’étendant au-delà du cercle polaire.

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3. Conclusions

– Pour comprendre ce qu’il se passe dans un jeu de données de température il ne faut pas considérer une seule mesure comme le fait l’article du Guardian; il ne faut pas non plus considérer une seule station de mesure.

– Si l’on désire faire passer des droites parmi les données de température, les plus longues séries disponibles sont celles de la station Orcadas (depuis 1902), qui est quand même assez éloignée de la péninsule Antarctique. On constate alors un réchauffement d’environ + 2°C en 110 ans (la courbe de tendance coupe –5°C en 1900 et –3°C en 2010). Cependant, en considérant des courbes polynomiales dont le coefficient de détermination est meilleur on constate que les températures moyennes chutent depuis les années 2000, comme dans toutes les stations de la péninsule Antarctique présentées dans cet article.

– Les phénomènes naturels suivent rarement des droites. Ils sont généralement cycliques, avec des périodes et amplitudes très variables. Il est donc permis de conclure que la péninsule Antarctique ne se réchauffe pas depuis 25 ans. Ceci est confirmé par d’autres analyses (voir ici et ici) et il est dommage qu’une fois de plus les médias ne fassent pas plus preuve de rigueur et se permettent des raccourcis donnant une information inexacte à 100%. En sont-ils seulement conscients ?

climate-debate

Study: Computer Models Overestimate Observed Arctic Warming

by Craig Idso, February 26, 2020 in ClimateChageDispatch

Paper Reviewed:
Huang, J., Ou, T., Chen, D., Lun, Y. and Zhao, Z. 2019. The amplified Arctic warming in recent decades may have been overestimated by CMIP5 models. Geophysical Research Letters 46: 13,338-12,345.

Policies aimed at protecting humanity and the environment from the potential effects of CO2-induced global warming rely almost entirely upon models predicting large future temperature increases.

But what if those predictions are wrong? What if a comparison between model projections and observations revealed the models are overestimating the amount of warming?

Would climate alarmists admit as much and back away from promoting extreme policies of CO2 emission reductions?

Probably not — at least based upon the recent rhetoric of each of the candidates seeking the Democrat Party’s nomination for President of the United States, all of whom continue to call for the complete elimination of all CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use within the next three decades, or less.

But for non-ideologues who are willing to examine and accept the facts as they are, the recent work of Huang et al. (2019) provides reason enough to pause the crazy CO2 emission-reduction train.

In their study, the five researchers set out to examine how well model projections of Arctic temperatures (poleward of 60°N) compared with good old-fashioned observations.

More specifically, they used a statistical procedure suitable for nonlinear analysis (ensemble empirical mode decomposition) to examine secular Arctic warming over the period 1880-2017.

Observational data utilized in the study were obtained from the HadCRUT4.6 temperature database, whereas model-based temperature projections were derived from simulations from 36 Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) global climate models (GCMs).

Figure 1. Observed and model-predicted rates of nonlinear, secular warming in the Arctic (60-90°N) over the period 1880-2017. The black and red dashed lines indicate the 10th and 90th percentiles for temperature means. Adapted from Huang et al. (2019).

As indicated there, the model-estimated rate of secular warming (the solid red line) increased quite sharply across the 138 year period, rising from a value of around 0°C per decade at the beginning of the record to a value of 0.35°C per decade in the end.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

The Death Of Science Is The Real Climate Emergency

by M. Phillips, February 25, 2020 in ClimateChangeDispatch

A few commentators have begun to stumble towards the fact that the policy of becoming “carbon neutral” by 2050, as adopted by the UK and the EU, would undo modernity itself.

On Unherd, Peter Franklin observes that, if carried through, the policy will have a far greater effect than Brexit or anything else; it will transform society altogether.

“It will continue to transform the power industry, and much else besides: every mode of transport; how we build, warm and cool our homes; food, agriculture and land use; trade, industry, every part of the economy”.

Franklin is correct. Even so, he seems not to grasp the full implications of the disaster he intuits – because he thinks there’s some kind of middle way through which the imminent eco-apocalypse can be prevented without returning Britain to the Middle Ages.

In a similar vein, he quotes Rachel Wolf, a co-author of the 2019 Conservative manifesto, who is prone to the same kind of magical thinking. She wrote:

“Government has committed to ‘net zero’ greenhouse gas emissions because it does not want the side effects of the energy sources we have used for centuries to destroy the planet. At the same time, we do not want to return to an era where children (and their mothers) regularly died, and where the majority of people lived in what would now in the UK be considered wholly unacceptable poverty. This is a staggering challenge.”

This is what we might call an understatement. What is truly staggering is, first, that any sentient person thinks this can be done and, second, that it should be done.

 

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climate-debate

Débattre du climat : quel contenu ?

by M. de Rougemont, 25 février 2020 in EuropeanScientist

Dès lors que la moindre critique est faite à propos de la doxa climatique son auteur se verra systématiquement désigné comme négationniste. Si, par-dessus le marché, ladite critique est pleine de bon sens, alors des caciques de ce système s’empressent de publier une tribune publique afin de mettre l’intru au pilori, évitant bien d’entrer en matière et de traiter des questions posées. Il s’agit de bien rappeler qui a droit à la parole et de rappeler aux non-sachants que le débat est clos car la cause est entendue. Un bizarre syndicat international de presse dictant la bien-pensance climatique a d’ailleurs décidé que laisser s’exprimer des voix critiques serait leur faire une part trop belle. La célérité et le ton de ces répliques témoignent pourtant d’une grande inquiétude car faire taire l’intrus n’a jamais été une manifestation de force et de tranquillité. Cela laisse même à penser que s’il y avait complot, ce serait plutôt celui destiné à éviter à tout prix la nécessaire dispute autour d’un sujet si important.

Nonobstant la clôture bien prématurée de ce débat jamais initié, il faut en décrire les chapitres qui devraient le composer.  Ce drame climatique se déroule sur trois scènes : scientifique, stratégique et politique.

SCIENCE ET PSEUDO-SCIENCE

Les données issues de moins de deux siècles d’observations directes, dont moins de cinquante ans par satellite, et de la paléoclimatologie nous enseignent les variations passées et certaines corrélations ou manques de corrélation. Ces données ne font pas l’objet de réfutations majeures et fondées. Un réchauffement est donc bien constaté depuis la fin du petit âge glaciaire coïncidant avec le début de l’ère industrielle ; il est de l’ordre de 0.8 à 1 °C avec des fluctuations dont certaines restent encore inexpliquées.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

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…

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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.

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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.

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climate-debate

Melanie Phillips: The Real Western Civilisation Emergency

by Melanie Phillips, February 22, 2020 in GWPF

The “climate emergency”, which we are told threatens the imminent collapse of civilisation and the extinction of humanity, is a dogma being enforced by a culturally totalitarian tyranny. Threatening the living standards of millions, permitting no challenge and wrecking the livelihoods and reputations of any who dares dissent, it has been created by a repudiation of science, humanity and reason: the very markers of modernity and the west. This is the real emergency.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

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

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better to know...?, climate-debate

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.

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

better to know...?, climate-debate

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.

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climate-debate

Is “All-Time Antarctic 20.75C Record High Temperature” Just A Sensational Hoax? Station Data Show Only 16C

by P. Gosselin, February 17, 2020 in NoTricksZone

In Germany there have been rumors that the alleged Antarctic Seymour Island “all-time Antarctic record high” of 20.75°C set on February 9th is a hoax – originating by the AFP news agency and then spread by The Guardian.

The alleged 20.75°C was supposedly logged by Brazilian scientists and was supposedly almost a full degree higher than the previous record of 19.8C, taken on Signy Island in January 1982, The Guardian blared with much alarm, citing its own rush job chart.

Currently the WMO is seeking to obtain the actual temperature data for Seymour Island, part of a chain of islands off the Antarctic peninsula.

WMO cites media as source!

The WMO website itself is citing the media as its source, writing: “Media reports say that researchers logged a temperature of 20.75°C. Mr Cerveny cautioned that it is premature to say that Antarctica has exceeded 20°C for the first time.”

Thermometer data show only 16°C!

According to German Facebook site Klima.Wissen here and its readers, the “all-time record high reading” of 20.75°C appears to have its origins from the AFP news agency. It was then picked up by the always climate sensational The Guardian. But now the whole story is beginning to appear as just big sensational hoax.

First, WetterOnline.de here shows that the high temperature on February 9th at the Seymour Island station (Base Murambio) was merely 16°C!

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better to know...?, climate-debate

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

 

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climate-debate

Greta’s, The Guardian’s Latest Panic Attack Over Antarctica Record Ignores Cooling Trends Of Recent Decades

by P. Gosselin, February 15, 2020 in NoTricksZone

In her latest panic attack, teenage Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg – citing the Guardian –  once again appeared to be proclaiming the end of the world was a step closer when she tweeted Antarctica has set a new record high temperature:

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Two new warm records

According to the Guardian, “The 20.75C logged by Brazilian scientists at Seymour Island on 9 February was almost a full degree higher than the previous record of 19.8C, taken on Signy Island in January 1982.”

That reading, the Guardian reports, follows the February 6 record of 18.3C recorded at the Argentinian research station, Esperanza measured.

As is the case with most alarmists, every warm single datapoint anomaly gets uncritically accepted with open arms as solid evidence of man-made global warming while cold trends get dismissed or downgraded as “natural variability”.

Seymour Island has been cooling for over a quarter century

So we have two recent warm records set at and near the Antarctic peninsula over the past week or so and that means the region there is heating up, alarmists like Greta and the Guardian want us to believe. But what are the real TRENDS there? Do the 2 recent warm records mean the region is heating up.

Looking at official data from NASA, it turns out that warming isn’t true. And because climate is always changing, the temperature in the region in question has also not remained completely steady. The only possibility left? COOLING.

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Also here

better to know...?, climate-debate

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.

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climate-debate

Mille milliards pour atteindre la neutralité carbone ?

by Samuel Furfari, 11 février 2020 in L’Echo

On perçoit que cette résolution est la prémisse qui va permettre d’amplifier les politiques keynésiennes en vue de relancer une économie européenne poussive par les dépenses publiques, c’est-à-dire in fine par la levée de nouvelles taxes, qu’elles soient appelées ” carbone ” ou autrement.

La majorité du parlement européen (les partis social-chrétien, socialiste et écologiste) a adopté le 15 janvier 2020 le pacte vert pour l’Europe, une résolution en 120 points qui vise la neutralité carbone d’ici 2050. Ils auraient d’ailleurs pu appeler cette résolution “transition juste” puisque cette expression s’y retrouve 15 fois. Qui peut s’opposer à quelque chose de juste? On peut observer que d’après cette majorité parlementaire, il n’y aura pas de justice sans financement.

Ces députés européens sont en faveur d’un plan d’investissement durable ambitieux pour parvenir à la “transition juste”. On retrouve d’ailleurs 49 fois les mots ” financement ” et ses dérivés. Or les critères de Maastricht ne permettent pas aux États membres de dépenser de manière inconsidérée l’argent qu’ils n’ont pas. On perçoit que cette résolution est la prémisse qui va permettre d’amplifier les politiques keynésiennes en vue de relancer une économie européenne poussive par les dépenses publiques, c’est-à-dire in fine par la levée de nouvelles taxes, qu’elles soient appelées “carbone” ou autrement. Pour preuve, cette résolution “se félicite de la proposition prévue d’une révision de la directive sur la taxation de l’énergie”.

La Commission européenne propose un plan sur dix ans visant à accélérer la transition climatique de l’Europe, plan financé à hauteur de mille milliards, tout en reconnaissant que c’est insuffisant. “Mille milliards de mille sabords”, aurait sans doute juré le capitaine Haddock. Mille milliards c’est ce qu’on appelle un “trillion” : c’est 1 000.000.000.000 euros. Oui, un trillion c’est énormément d’argent.

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climate-debate

Climate Change is not a problem: Unless we make it one.

by Martin Capages Jr., February 11, 2020 in WUWT

INTRODUCTION

As long as humans have been on Earth, they have been adapting to changes in regional climates. A regional climate is the average of the weather for a relatively long period of time, usually 30+ years, at a particular location on the planet. The natural periodicity of prolonged regional weather variations has been documented in various ways by humans for eons. For a comparison of human civilization in the northern hemisphere to Greenland ice core temperatures for the last 18,000 years see here. Some of the means of documenting changes in long term weather patterns, i.e. climate change, include crude prehistoric cave drawings of the animals and plants, paintings of frozen rivers (see Figure 1 of ice skating on the River Thames in 1684), and archaeological digs. There are also written records of climatic conditions as early as 5,000 years ago, perhaps even earlier. Ice, subsea, peat and lake bed cores are also used, for a more detailed discussion of the methods used see here and the links therein.

Figure 1. Ice skating on the River Thames in London in January 1684, during the Little Ice Age. Museum of London, link.

 

Continuer la lecture de Climate Change is not a problem: Unless we make it one. →

climate-debate

Media’s Horribly Dishonest Antarctica Propaganda

by Jim Steele, February 9, 2020 in WUWT

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The current context for the Antarctica Peninsula is that for over a decade it has experienced cooling temperatures driven by natural variability. In fact, glaciers in Esperanza’s region have also expanded. Esperanza’s record temperature simply happened due to foehn winds despite a cooling trend. Unfortunately, the media would rather scare the public to promote a climate crisis, than honestly educate them about the causes of natural climate variability.

better to know...?, climate-debate

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 ? →

climate-debate

Nature Has Been Removing Excess CO2 4X Faster than IPCC Models

by Dr. Roy Spencer, February 5, 2020 in WUWT

Note: What I present below is scarcely believable to me. I have looked for an error in my analysis, but cannot find one. Nevertheless, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so let the following be an introduction to a potential issue with current carbon cycle models that might well be easily resolved by others with more experience and insight than I possess.

Summary

Sixty years of Mauna Loa CO2 data compared to yearly estimates of anthropogenic CO2 emissions shows that Mother Nature has been removing 2.3%/year of the “anthropogenic excess” of atmospheric CO2 above a baseline of 295 ppm. When similar calculations are done for the RCP (Representative Concentration Pathway) projections of anthropogenic emissons and CO2 concentrations it is found that the carbon cycle models those projections are based upon remove excess CO2 at only 1/4th the observed rate. If these results are anywhere near accurate, the future RCP projections of CO2, as well as the resulting climate model projection of resulting warming, are probably biased high.

 

Introduction

My previous post from a few days ago showed the performance of a simple CO2 budget model that, when forced with estimates of yearly anthropogenic emissions, very closely matches the yearly average Mauna Loa CO2 observations during 1959-2019. I assume that a comparable level of agreement is a necessary condition of any model that is relied upon to predict future levels of atmospheric CO2 if it is have any hope of making useful predictions of climate change.

In that post I forced the model with EIA projections of future emissions (0.6%/yr growth until 2050) and compared it to the RCP (Representative Concentration Pathway) scenarios used for forcing the IPCC climate models. I concluded that we might never reach a doubling of atmospheric CO2 (2XCO2).

But what I did not address was the relative influence on those results of (1) assumed future anthropogenic CO2 emissions versus (2) how fast nature removes excess CO2 from the atmosphere. Most critiques of the RCP scenarios address the former, but not the latter. Both are needed to produce an RCP scenario.

I implied that the RCP scenarios from models did not remove CO2 fast enough, but I did not actually demonstrate it. That is the subject of this short article.

What Should the Atmospheric CO2 Removal Rate be Compared To?

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climate-debate

Will Humanity Ever Reach 2XCO2? Possibly Not

by Dr. Roy Spencer, February 2, 2020 in WUWT

Summary

The Energy Information Agency (EIA) projects a growth in energy-based CO2 emissions of +0.6%/yr through 2050. But translating future emissions into atmospheric CO2 concentration requires a global carbon budget model, and we frequently accept the United Nations reliance on such models to tell us how much CO2 will be in the atmosphere for any given CO2 emissions scenario. Using a simple time-dependent CO2 budget model forced with yearly estimates of anthropogenic CO2 emissions and optimized to match Mauna Loa observations, I show that the EIA emissions projections translate into surprisingly low CO2 concentrations by 2050. In fact, assuming constant CO2 emissions after 2050, the atmospheric CO2 content eventually stabilizes at just under 2XCO2.

Introduction

I have always assumed that we are on track for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 (“2XCO2”), if not 3XCO2 or 4XCO2. After all, humanity’s CO2 emissions continue to increase, and even if they stop increasing, won’t atmospheric CO2 continue to rise?

It turns out, the answer is probably “no”.

The rate at which nature removes CO2 from the atmosphere, and what controls that rate, makes all the difference.

Even if we knew exactly what humanity’s future CO2 emissions were going to be, how much Mother Nature takes out of the atmosphere is seldom discussed or questioned. This is the domain of global carbon cycle models which we seldom hear about. We hear about the improbability of the RCP8.5 concentration scenario (which has gone from “business-as-usual”, to “worst case”, to “impossible”), but not much about how those CO2 concentrations were arrived at from CO2 emissions data.

So, I wanted to address the question, What is the best estimate of atmospheric CO2 concentrations through the end of this century, based upon the latest estimates of future CO2 emissions, and taking into account how much nature has been removing from the atmosphere?

As we produce more and more CO2, the amount of CO2 removed by various biological and geophysical processes also goes up. The history of best estimates of yearly anthropogenic CO2 emissions, combined with the observed rise of atmospheric CO2 at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, tells us a lot about how fast nature adjusts to more CO2.

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