Archives par mot-clé : Fun?/Discussion

Doomsday Climate Studies Turn Out To Be Overblown Nonsense

by Washington Are Beacon Staff, Feb 17, 2022  in The WashigntonFreeBeacon


For over a decade, scientists have warned that the acidification of ocean water could decimate fish populations. Acidification changed fish behavior, several studies found, making them less likely to evade predators.

As carbon emissions pushed pH levels higher and higher, climate advocates sounded an apocalyptic tone. Fewer fish would mean fewer fisheries, which would imperil the livelihoods of millions of fishermen across the globe. It could also mean fewer medicines, many of which are derived from marine life.

 

According to a new paper in a top-ranked biology journal, these concerns are vastly overblown.

The paper, published in PLOS Biology on Feb. 3, reviewed 91 studies of the effect of ocean acidification on fish behavior. It found that better-quality studies tended to find smaller effects on fish behavior—and that the studies with the most dramatic results tended to have low sample size, making them less statistically reliable.

Hundreds More Papers Published In 2021 Support A Skeptical Position On Climate Alarm

by K. Richard, Feb 14, 2022 in NoTricksZone


In 2021, several hundred more scientific papers were published that cast doubt on the position that anthropogenic CO2 emissions function as the climate’s fundamental control knob…or that otherwise serve to question the efficacy of climate models or the related “consensus” positions commonly endorsed by policymakers and mainstream media sources.

These scientific papers affirm the position that there are significant limitations and uncertainties inherent in our understanding of climate and climate changes…emphasizing that climate science is not settled.

More specifically, the papers in this compilation support these four main skeptical positions — categorized here as N(1) – N(4) — which question the climate alarm popularized in today’s headlines.

N(1) Natural mechanisms play well more than a negligible role (as claimed by the IPCC) in the net changes in the climate system, which includes temperature variations, precipitation patterns, weather events, etc., and the influence of increased CO2 concentrations on climatic changes are less pronounced than currently imagined.

N(2) The warming/sea levels/glacier and sea ice retreat/precipitation extremes…experienced during the modern era are neither unprecedented or remarkable, nor do they fall outside the range of natural variability.

N(3) The computer climate models are neither reliable or consistently accurate; the uncertainty and error ranges are irreducible; and projections of future climate states (i.e., an intensification of the hydrological cycle) are not supported by observations and/or are little more than speculation.

N(4) Current emissions-mitigation policies, especially related to the advocacy for renewables, are often ineffective and even harmful to the environment, whereas elevated CO2 and a warmer climate provide unheralded benefits to the biosphere (i.e., a greener planet and enhanced crop yields, lower mortality with warming).

In sharp contrast to the above, the corresponding “consensus” positions that these papers do not support are:

A(1) Close to or over 100% (110%) of the warming since 1950 has been caused by increases in anthropogenic CO2 emissions, leaving natural attribution at something close to 0%.

Are electric cars the new ‘diesel scandal’ waiting to happen? They generate polluting particles just like petrol vehicles, are not even that cost-effective and, as one expert finds, will not save the planet

by B. Lomborg, Feb 6, 2022 in Daily Mail


  • While diesel cars tend to be more fuel-efficient with lower emissions, they also emit greater quantities of other pollutants that damage air quality and health 

  • Now, electric cars could be the future for many as BJORN LOMBORG explains

Do you remember Britain’s ‘dash for diesel’? It began more than 20 years ago when the then Chancellor, Gordon Brown, announced a new car tax system favouring vehicles with lower emissions of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming.

Diesel cars tend to be more fuel-efficient with lower emissions, and Mr Brown hailed them as the greener and cheaper option. Over a decade and a half, the number of such vehicles on British roads quadrupled.

What didn’t emerge until much later — although it was no secret in the motor industry or among government officials — was that diesel cars also emitted greater quantities of other pollutants, nitrogen oxides and particulates that damage air quality and human health.

 

Methane Spikes !

by Kip Hansen, Feb 10, 2022 in WUWT


Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in atmospheric methane

Our ever benevolent and protective scientist class has come to our rescue by raising the alarm – if they didn’t, we might not be adequately alarmed by this dangerous situation.

Seriously, the Nature punchline is, as you may have already guessed:  “some researchers fear that global warming itself is behind the rapid rise.” 

Yes, that’s right.  Global Warming (itself!) may be behind the rapid rise.

The author of the Nature article, Jeff Tollefson, calls this a “grim milestone” (however, no reason for this being either grim or a milestone is given).

Those interested in this trivial issue should read the Nature article.  There are some interesting points in it concerning suspected and hypothesized sources of the methane and the reason for the rather odd pattern of rise and fall seen in multi-year data.

However, here is:

The Bottom Line

1.  Always look at the units attached to any numerical data.

1900 ppb (parts per billion) is 1.9 ppm (parts per million)

Or, in percentage of the atmosphere:

0.000 19 Percent [%]

2.  What that means in the Real World™ is that the amount of methane in the atmosphere is so small — there is more neon and helium in the atmosphere than methane — that if you searched for a molecule of methane, and individually sorted through a BILLION molecules, you might find one or two.  You might find none in your first billion, but if you sorted enough billions, your find would average out at just under 2 per billion. (Good Luck!)

3. As the Earth continues to warm and green as it comes out of the Little Ice Age, we see more life which means more methane.  More life is a Good Thing.

4.  Atmospheric Methane has spiked! — to almost zero.

# # # # #h

Author’s Comment:

Almost Zero is an important issue.  Many of the most popular dangers and harms touted in the popular press are about the crisis of “things” being discovered at levels which are best described as “Almost Zero”.  This is the nutty misapplication of the precautionary principle, where the mere existence —  the mere detection —  of a thing is automatically equated with harm.

The IPCC CO2 Climate Narrative: A “Behemoth On Clay Feet” …Ready To Collapse

by P. Gosselin, Fab, 6, 2022 in NoTricksZone


The earth’s history provides the solid proof that acquits CO2. The IPCC’s claim of CO2 being the dominant climate factor is a behemoth on clay feet. 

By Fred F. Mueller

Have you ever had an uneasy feeling when watching the aggressive, intolerant stance of the apologists of “man-made climate catastrophe” against all critics?

The overwhelming majority of our elites blame CO2 emitted by mankind to be responsible for “a runaway overheating” of our atmosphere. “The science” spearheaded by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calls for us to renounce fossil fuels and return to the frugal lifestyle of the 18th or 19th century.

You might well find you’re not alone with that unease, which is proliferating rapidly since social media giants have started to censor people daring to question the IPCC’s “science is settled” attitude.

105 More Non-Global Warming/Non-Hockey Stick Temperature Records Added To The Database In 2021

by K. Richard, Jan 31, 2022 in NoTricksZone


Since 2019,there have been over 350 peer-reviewed scientific papers published showing no warming in the modern era and/or much warmer temperatures than today when CO2 levels ranged from 180 to 280 ppm (Holocene, Pleistocene).

Below is the link to the updated (now including 2021) database of non-hockey temperature records from locations across the world.

These hundreds of papers suggest a) Earth was multiple degrees warmer than today throughout much of the last 11,700 years (Holocene), and b) there has been nothing unusual about temperature changes in the modern era.

The first 8 papers on the 2021 list are shown below as samples.

Over 350 Non-Hockey Sticks (2019-2021)

Zhou et al., 2021  South China Sea ~4°C warmer SST during the Middle Holocene…1994-2004 coldest temperatures of the last 6000 years.

Climate Alarmists Conceal Global Temperature Anomaly Measurement Declines Despite Increasing Atmospheric CO2

by L. Hamlin, Jan 17, 2022 in WUWT


OAA published its global climate report for year end 2021 highlighting that its global temperature anomaly measurements showed 2021 being the sixth highest of its recorded measurements. NOAA’s global annual measurement for 2021 was 0.84 degrees C.

NOAA chose to emphasize that the annual 2021 temperature anomaly was in the top ten of its recorded years as follows:

“The year culminated as the sixth warmest year on record for the globe with a temperature that was 0.84°C (1.51°F) above the 20th century average. The years 2013–2021 all rank among the ten warmest years on record.”

What NOAA failed to highlight was that the year-end 2021 global temperature anomaly measurement marked the continuing decline of its global temperature anomaly measurements that have now fallen for the last 6 years since peak year 2016 as shown in their graph below. These declining measurement outcomes make a complete mockery of recent climate alarmists scientifically unsupported politically contrived “climate emergency” propaganda claims.

Nearly 140 Scientific Papers Detail The Minuscule Effect CO2 Has On Earth’s Temperature

by K. Richard, Jan 13, 2022 in  NoTricksZone


We have updated our “Extremely Low CO2 Climate Sensitivity” scientific paper list with new papers added from 2021 and some newly discovered papers from the past.

As of 2016 this list had only 50 papers on it (as indicated by the web address). In less than 6 years the list has grown to 137 (as of today).

Click on the link for the full list.

135+ Papers Find Extremely Low CO2 Climate Sensitivity

A few of the sample papers are shown here.

Coe et al., 2021 (2XCO2 [400 to 800 ppm] = 0.5°C)

The HITRAN database of gaseous absorption spectra enables the absorption of earth radiation at its current temperature of 288K to be accurately determined for each individual atmospheric constituent and also for the combined absorption of the atmosphere as a whole. From this data it is concluded that H2O is responsible for 29.4K of the 33K warming, with CO2 contributing 3.3K and CH4 and N2O combined just 0.3K. Climate sensitivity to future increases in CO2 concentration is calculated to be 0.50K, including the positive feedback effects of H2O, while climate sensitivities to CH4 and N2O are almost undetectable at 0.06K and 0.08K respectively. This result strongly suggests that increasing levels of CO2 will not lead to significant changes in earth temperature and that increases in CH4 and N2O will have very little discernable impact.

Decembers 1961 & 1971

by P. Homewood, Jan 7, 2022 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat


 

December 1961 can be summed up in two words – cold and snow. The month was the 9th coldest on record since 1884.

The first week saw widespread snow and severe gales, whilst the Christmas week was one of the coldest of the century, with more heavy snow:

https://digital.nmla.metoffice.gov.uk/SO_7498a04d-6a40-4207-a27f-772663ffd2fc/

In this monthly lookback through the archives, two things are abundantly clear for every month we have checked:

1) Weather was every bit as extreme in the past

2) The weather can vary enormously from one year to another. This can not be better exemplified than the series for December, which has offered up very mild months to very cold ones, very dry ones to very wet, and very snowy ones to very little snow.

Scientists Recruiting Kids for Climate Propaganda

by E. Worrall, Dec 27, 2021 in WUWT 


 

The researchers found that children do bring home what they’ve learned at school and communicate it to their parents, engaging in ways that spur parents to reconsider their views. This is partly due to the trust that exists between parents and children, making it easier to talk about an emotionally-charged issue such as climate change. Over the years, both the control and experimental groups developed more concern about climate change, but the change was most pronounced in families where children were taught the curriculum

Why We Must “Quit Worrying About Uncertainty in Sea Level Projections”

by K. Hansen, Dec 2, 2021 in CO2Coalition


It is an interesting read but not because it presents good advice to the scientific community.  Rather, it presents the case that climate and ice models, which are used to make projections, are not up to the task.  While those who program climate models have been trained in what we know about the basic physics involved in the biggest sea level rise issue – ice sheet dynamics – the actual projections by those models depend on parameters that are loose guesses about things we don’t know.  As a result, Bassis says “…recent studies using climate and ice sheet models are, more and more often, coming to very different conclusions about future rates of sea level rise and even about the sensitivity of ice sheets to future warming…”  and because of that, he tells us:

“Large discrepancies among model projections of long-term sea level rise have spawned calls among the scientific community for scientists to work on reducing uncertainty. However, focusing on uncertainty is a trap we must avoid. Instead, we should focus on the adaptation decisions we can already make on the basis of current models and communicating and building confidence in models for longer-term decisions.”

Kip Hansen is an expert on sea level and sea-level rise. Prolific author of numerous articles on the subjects. WUWT lists 445 commentaries and articles.

He has spent much of his adult life at sea, first as an officer on a merchant ship, and later as a USCG-licensed captain in the Caribbean, where he sailed with his wife while doing humanitarian work (mostly Dominican Republic).

He is a proud member of the CO2 Coalition.

 This commentary was first published by the CO2 Coalition, December 3, 2021

New Study: Modelers Got Aerosols All Wrong…CO2 Climate Sensitivity Likely Another 0.4°C Overstated!

by P. Gosselin, Nov 26, 2021 in WUWT


Die kalte Sonne reports on a new aerosol study by Liu et al.

The results are a major blow to the high greenhouse-gas climate sensitivity modelers.

IPCC scientists have a favorite wild card they often use to explain serious model discrepancies: aerosols. Mysterious cooling events in the past are often explained away by aerosols from major volcanic eruptions, for example. They act to filter out sunlight.

ccording to IPCC climate models, the mean global temperature should have risen by 1.5°C since 1850 due to the higher CO2 concentrations. But best estimates show that it has instead risen by only 1.1°C. So what about the missing 0.4°C?

Naturally, the missing 0.4°C of warming since 1850 gets explained by the higher 20th century aerosol levels in the atmosphere – due to the burning of fossil fuels. Air pollution by man over the course of the late 19th century and entire 20th century are said to have dimmed the earth, and thus this explains the 0.4°C less warming.

Surprise: global aerosol emissions have been flat over past 250 years

But now results by a new study appearing in the journal Science Advances by Liu et al tells us that the forcing by aerosols had to have been overestimated by climate modelers. IPCC modelers insisted that 20th century aerosol concentrations were higher than during the pre-industrial times, and this is what kept the climate from warming by 1.5°C.

According to the scientists led by Liu, however, atmospheric aerosols in the preindustrial times were just as high as they were just recently. They were in fact more or less constant over the past 250 years. No change means it could not have been aerosols putting the brakes on temperature rise:

That’s a real embarrassment for the IPCC modelers. It means CO2 climate sensitivity has been overestimated.

Physicists: Climate Model Error Overestimates CO2 Impact On Global Temps By Factor Of 5

by K. Richard, Nov 22, 2021 in NoTricksZone


A new study suggests CO2 molecules have little consequential impact affecting outgoing radiation, and that climate models attribute global temperature effects to CO2 that are fundamentally erroneous.

Russian physicists (Smirnov and Zhilyaev, 2021) have published a peer-reviewed paper in the Advances in Fundamental Physics Special Issue for the journal Foundations.

They assesses the role of CO2 molecules in the standard atmosphere and assert “we have a contradiction with the results of climatological models in the analysis of the Earth’s greenhouse effect.”

Key points from the paper include the following:

1. Climate model calculations of CO2’s impact on global temperatures are in error by a factor of 5 as a result of “ignoring, in climatological models, the Kirchhoff law” which says radiators are “simultaneously the absorbers.”

2. Change in the concentration of an optically active atmospheric component (like CO2) “would not lead to change in the outgoing radiative flux.”

3. CO2 molecules “are not the main radiator of the atmosphere.” Water vapor molecules are, and thus they “may be responsible for the observed heating of the Earth.”

COP26–The Stage Show

by P. Homewood, Nov 9, 2021 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat


Maybe it’s just me, but I get the impression that COP26 is little more than a stage managed exercise in virtue signalling, allowing world leaders and the great and the good to pat themselves on the back and pretend they are saving the planet.

Today’s discussions will mainly focus, believe it or not, on gender issues! Yesterday’s big event was a speech by yesterday’s man, Obama, calling on “young people to remain angry”.

If you think back to Paris and earlier COPs, they were acted out as some sort of drama. Arguments between countries, late night sessions, all miraculously resolved at the 11th hour with an “Agreement” to save the planet.

Maybe the scene for COP26 was set months ago, when it became clear that China, India and the rest of the developing world would not commit to any emission reductions by 2030, or for that matter 2035.

And if any doubts about this lingered, the refusal of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin to turn up soon cleared those up.

To recap, the main purpose of COP26 was to get countries to set new emission targets, as mandated every five years under the Paris Agreement. Given that the pledges made at Paris, the NDCs, or Nationally Determined Contributions, only set targets for 2030, the logic was that this year would see pledges for 2035.

But this has not been the case. Instead some countries have made small adjustments to their 2030 targets, which in overall terms won’t make the blindest of difference:

 

See also:  BBC’s COP26 Propaganda

Presidents Xi and Putin (and the Hedge Funds!) are laughing at us

by P. Homewood, Nov 8, 2021 in NotaLotofPeople KnowThat


The gap between rhetoric and fact is a perennial feature of politics. But seldom can the chasm between claim and reality have been as wide as that displayed by Alok Sharma at the Cop26 conference in Glasgow. The British president of the latest intergovernmental climate change gathering told the delegates (and the world’s media) that “the end of coal is in sight”, as a result of the agreement he had negotiated.


That was the rhetoric. Now the fact. Not only was the declaration to phase out coal by the 2040s not signed by the world’s top three consumers (China, India and America, which account for more than 70 per cent of the global CO2 emissions from burning the stuff); the pledge itself was neutered by the addition of the get-out “or as soon as possible thereafter”.

CO2 and Temperature

by A. May, Nov 9, 2021 in WUWT


I had a very interesting online discussion about CO2 and temperature with Tinus Pulles, a retired Dutch environmental scientist. To read the whole discussion, go to the comments at the end of this post. He presented me with a graphic from Dr. Robert Rohde from twitter that you can find here. It is also plotted below, as Figure 1.

Conclusion

I’m not impressed with Rohde’s display. The coefficient of correlation is decent, but it does not show that warming is controlled by changes in CO2, the temperature reversals are not explained. The reversals strongly suggest that natural forces are playing a significant role in the warming and can reverse the influence of CO2. The plots show that, at most, CO2 explains about 50% of the warming, something else, like solar changes, must be causing the reversals. If they can reverse the CO2-based warming and overwhelm the influence of CO2 they are just as strong.

Climate change is no catastrophe

by M. Shellenberger, Nov 3, 2021 in Unherd


No global problem has ever been more exaggerated than climate change. As it has gone from being an obscure scientific question to a theme in popular culture, we’ve lost all sense of perspective.

Here are the facts: in Europe, emissions in 2020 were 26% below 1990 levels. In the United States, emissions in 2020 were 22% below 2005 levels. Emissions are likely to start declining, too, in developing nations, including China and India, within the next decade. Most nations’ emissions will be bigger this year than last, due to post-Covid economic growth. But global emissions are still likely to peak within the next decade.

And the result will be a much smaller increase in global average temperatures than almost anyone predicted just five years ago. The best science now predicts that temperatures are likely to rise just 2.5-3°Cabove pre-industrial levels. It’s not ideal, but it’s a far cry from the hysterical and apocalyptic predictions of 6°C, made just a decade ago. A 3°C increase is hardly an existential threat to humanity.

Not that you’d know it, if you had half an eye on the headlines this summer. The floods, fires and heatwaves that plagued the world were, for many observers, proof that the impacts of climate change have already become catastrophic. In Europe, more than 150 people died in flooding. In the United States, wildfire season started earlier and lasted longer, razing hundreds of thousands of acres. Around the world, hundreds died from heatwaves.

But again, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the facts: there has been a 92% decline in the per decade death toll from natural disasters since its peak in the 1920s. In that decade, 5.4 million people died from natural disasters. In the 2010s, just 0.4 million did. Globally, the five-year period ending in 2020 had the fewest natural disaster deaths of any five-year period since 1900. And this decline occurred during a period when the global population nearly quadrupled — and temperatures rose more than 1°C degree centigrade above pre-industrial levels.

The climate moaners need to get some perspective from history

by Ian Plimmer, Nov 4, 2021, SpectatorAustralia


Greta Thunberg rejects all ideas of the enlightenment. Despite what she wails, she is now living in the best times ever to be a child on planet Earth. She can actually go to FLOP26, something that few of us would want to do. Would she prefer to live in the worst of times when there was panic, suffering, environmental damage, death and no hope which she claims exists today?  

We now eat better, are less affected by natural disasters and are able to cope with extremes of weather and climate. During the last 4 of at least 20,000 generations of humans, child mortality has decreased and global human longevity increased from 25 to 79 years. The climate moaners need to get some perspective from history. 

The worst years to live since the time of Jesus were 535-550 AD because massive volcanic eruptions, perhaps Kamchatka or Alaska in 535-536 AD and Ilopango in El Salvador from 539-540 AD. The Northern Hemisphere atmosphere with filled with dust and acid sulphate clouds. These volcanic eruptions were coincidental with extraterrestrial impacts in March 536 AD in the Gulf of Carpentaria and elsewhere in August 536 AD. To make matters worse, these were at the time of a Solar Minimum. 

The Sun was dimmed for 18 months, a white sulphuric acid aerosol cloud enveloped Europe, global temperature dropped by 1.5 to 2.5°C producing worldwide crop failures and death by starvation. There was migration (e.g. Slavic speaking people), political turmoil and the collapse of empires (e.g. Sasanian Empire in Persia). Tree rings show almost no growth for a few years.  

 

Continuer la lecture de The climate moaners need to get some perspective from history

The Decline, the Stick and The Trick – Part 1uydi

by S. McIntyre, Nov 2, 2021 in ClimateAudit


One of the central claims of The Trick, if not the most central claim, was that “hiding the decline” was nothing more than an inopportune phrase about a single diagram.

It wasn’t.

The “trick to hide the decline” was an inopportune, if revealing, phrase, but rather than the issue being limited to a single diagram, the inconsistency between the Decline (in observed tree ring widths and densities) and the Hockey Stick temperature reconstructions (primarily based on tree ring widths) was, together with the looting of the Baghdad Museum, the issue that inspired my original examination of Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick and was the driving theme of Climate Audit from its origin up to Climategate.  There are dozens, even hundreds, of Climate Audit articles that, in one way or another, relate back to the conundrum arising from the inconsistency of the underlying proxies and the superficial consistency of the reconstructions.

In this and a couple of follow-on articles, I’ll illustrate the centrality of The Decline vs The Stick in the controversies in the years prior to Climategate.  For the benefit of people that may be new to these disputes, I re-iterate that I never interpreted the late 20th century decline in ring widths as evidence of a decline in temperatures, but as a seriously problematic inconsistency for “reconstructions” relying in large part on tree rings.

April 2003

When I say that the Decline inspired my original examination of Michael Mann’s Stick, it is literally true.

I had become mildly interested in climate issues in late 2002 when the Canadian government was promoting the Kyoto treaty, including in its promotion the assertion that 1998 was the “warmest year” in 1000 years.  This was based on the 2001 IPCC Assessment Report, which included multiple versions of the Hockey Stick graph, one of which was the following:

The Climate Is Changing, And Human Activities Are The Cause”: How, Exactly, Do We Know That?

by F. Menton, Oct 28, 2021 in WUWT


“The climate is changing, and we are the cause.” That is a statement that is so often-repeated and affirmed that it goes way beyond mere conventional wisdom. Probably, you encounter some version or another of that statement multiple times per week; maybe dozens of times. Everybody knows that it is true! And to express disagreement with that statement, probably more so than with any other element of current progressive orthodoxy, is a sure way to get yourself labeled a “science denier,” fired from an academic job, or even banished from the internet.

The UN IPCC’s recent Sixth Assessment Report on the climate is chock full of one version after another of the iconic statement, in each instance of course emphasizing that the human-caused climate changes are deleterious and even catastrophic. Examples:

  • Human influence has likely increased the chance of compound extreme events since the 1950s. This includes increases in the frequency of concurrent heatwaves and droughts on the global scale (high confidence); fire weather in some regions of all inhabited continents (medium confidence); and compound flooding in some locations (medium confidence). (Page A.3.5)
  • Event attribution studies and physical understanding indicate that human-induced climate change increases heavy precipitation associated with tropical cyclones (high confidence) but data limitations inhibit clear detection of past trends on the global scale. (Page A.3.4, Box TS.10)
  • Some recent hot extreme events would have been extremely unlikely to occur without human influence on the climate system. (Page A.3.4, Box TX.10)

So, over and over, it’s that we have “high confidence” that human influence is the cause, or that events would have been “extremely unlikely” without human influence. But how, really, do we know that? What is the proof?

This seems to me to be rather an important question. After all, various world leaders are proposing to spend some tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars to undo what are viewed as the most important human influences on the climate (use of fossil fuels). Billions of people are to be kept in, or cast into, energy poverty to appease the climate change gods. Political leaders from every country in the world are about to convene in Scotland to agree to a set of mandates that will transform most everyone’s life. You would think that nobody would even start down this road without definitive proof that we know the cause of the problem and that the proposed solutions are sure to work.

If you address my question — what is the proof? — to the UN, they seem at first glance to have an answer. Their answer is “detection and attribution studies.” These are “scientific” papers that purport to look at evidence and come to the conclusion that the events under examination, whether temperature rise, hurricanes, tornadoes, heat waves, or whatever, have been determined to be “attributed” to human influences. But the reason I put the word “scientific” in quotes is that just because a particular paper appears in a “scientific” journal does not mean that it has followed the scientific method.

The UN IPCC’s latest report, known as “Assessment Report 6” or “AR6,” came out in early August, loaded up, as already noted, with one statement after another about “high confidence” in attribution of climate changes and disasters to human influences. In the couple of months since, a few statisticians who actually know what they are doing have responded. On August 10, right on the heels of the IPCC, Ross McKitrick — an economist and statistician at the University of Guelph in Canada — came out with a paper in Climate Dynamics titled “Checking for model consistency in optimal fingerprinting: a comment.” On October 22, the Global Warming Policy Foundation then published two Reports on the same topic, the first by McKitrick titled “Suboptimal Fingerprinting?”, and the second by statistician William Briggs titled “How the IPCC Sees What Isn’t There.” (Full disclosure: I am on the Board of the American affiliate of the GWPF.).

“Climate Emergency” – Nothing But Politics And Propaganda Unsupported By Scientific Data

by  L. Hamlin, Oct 6, 2021 in WUWT


The “climate emergency” claim hyped by Scientific American and other political climate alarmist entities is based on the completely fallacious statement that “the planet is heating up way to fast” with that flawed claim representing nothing but politics and propaganda that is disproved by actually measured global temperature anomaly temperature measurements between 1988 and 2021 as well as being directly contradicted by the more than 5 year-long declining global temperature anomaly data presented by all 5 major global temperature anomaly measurement systems between 2016 and 2021.

Change Climate in 15 Minutes

by J. Curry, Sept 3, 2021 in ClimateEtc


In a recent invited talk at the American Chemical Society annual meeting, I attempted to explain the climate debate in 15 minutes.

This talk was given in a session on sustainability. Other invited speakers included James Green (NASA Chief Scientist), Marilyn Brown (Georgia Tech) . Our talks were followed by a panel discussion. This was an extremely interesting session, but was not recorded owing to an ACS glitch (you can read the abstracts at the link above).

My presentation slides can be downloaded [here].

Re-evaluating the role of solar variability on Northern Hemisphere temperature trends since the 19th century

by W. Soon et al., 2015 in EarthScienceReviews


Abstract

Debate over what influence (if any) solar variability has had on surface air temperature trends since the 19th century has been controversial. In this paper, we consider two factors which may have contributed to this controversy:

1.

Several different solar variability datasets exist. While each of these datasets is constructed on plausible grounds, they often imply contradictory estimates for the trends in solar activity since the 19th century.

2.

Although attempts have been made to account for non-climatic biases in previous estimates of surface air temperature trends, recent research by two of the authors has shown that current estimates are likely still affected by non-climatic biases, particularly urbanization bias.

With these points in mind, we first review the debate over solar variability. We summarise the points of general agreement between most groups and the aspects which still remain controversial. We discuss possible future research which may help resolve the controversy of these aspects. Then, in order to account for the problem of urbanization bias, we compile a new estimate of Northern Hemisphere surface air temperature trends since 1881, using records from predominantly rural stations in the monthly Global Historical Climatology Network dataset. Like previous weather station-based estimates, our new estimate suggests that surface air temperatures warmed during the 1880s–1940s and 1980s–2000s. However, this new estimate suggests these two warming periods were separated by a pronounced cooling period during the 1950s–1970s and that the relative warmth of the mid-20th century warm period was comparable to the recent warm period.

We then compare our weather station-based temperature trend estimate to several other independent estimates. This new record is found to be consistent with estimates of Northern Hemisphere Sea Surface Temperature (SST) trends, as well as temperature proxy-based estimates derived from glacier length records and from tree ring widths. However, the multi-model means of the recent Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) climate model hindcasts were unable to adequately reproduce the new estimate — although the modelling of certain volcanic eruptions did seem to be reasonably well reproduced.

Finally, we compare our new composite to one of the solar variability datasets not considered by the CMIP5 climate models, i.e., Scafetta and Willson, 2014’s update to the Hoyt and Schatten, 1993 dataset. A strong correlation is found between these two datasets, implying that solar variability has been the dominant influence on Northern Hemisphere temperature trends since at least 1881. We discuss the significance of this apparent correlation, and its implications for previous studies which have instead suggested that increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide has been the dominant influence.

100% consensus on the Anthropogenic Global Warming? A skeptical examination

by S. Point, Aug 27, 2021 in EuropeanScientist


The theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming is regularly presented as benefiting from a solid scientific consensus. What proves the solidity of this consensus? A scientific article, published in 2016  by Cook and colleagues, proposed a synthesis of the work: from the examination of  studies available at that time, the authors showed that the consensus on the reality of climate change was shared by 90%-100% of scientific climate experts. An estimate that we find widely relayed in the media today. In 2019, Powell said he found consensus to be 100%. In this article, we propose to analyze the potential biases in the work of Cook and colleagues, in order to understand how these biases could affect the claimed level of consensus. We also deal with Powell’s recent assert of 100% consensus and enlighten potential cognitive & methodological biases in his approach.

AN UNDENIABLE CONSENSUS?

Températures extrêmes et foehn – Démonter le mythe des ‘dômes de chaleur’

by B. Van Vliet-Lanoë et J. Van Vliet, 27 août 2021, in ScienceClimat Energie


EN GUISE DE CONCLUSIONS

Les températures extrêmes observées en juin 2021 en Colombie britannique et dans le Nord-Ouest américain s’expliquent quantitativement et de manière classique par le gradient vertical de 9,8 K/km de l’adiabatique sèche, associé à une baisse d’altitude de 2 km, par l’intermédiaire d’un phénomène de foehn autocatalytique.Les concepts de « dôme de chaleur » et de Global Warming ne sont donc d’aucune utilité pour interpréter les observations. 

De manière plus générale, le phénomène de foehn peut être déclenché par la présence de hautes pressions dans le voisinage d’une chaîne de montagnes. La chaîne des Montagnes Rocheuses est particulièrement sujette à ces phénomènes depuis la Colombie britannique jusqu’à la Californie, mais elle est loin d’être la seule, comme le montre le Tableau 13. Le vent de foehn chaud et sec favorise également les incendies de forêts.

La genèse des hautes pressions peut résulter du passage d’ondes planétaires, mais également du passage d’AMP en provenance du vortex polaire. Ce dernier est particulièrement renforcé lorsque le vent solaire – ou l’activité aurorale qui lui est équivalente – faiblit, comme c’est le cas entre la fin d’un cycle solaire et la montée de l’activité du cycle suivant (Schlamminger 1990). Ceci explique pourquoi les hautes pressions et les vagues de froid sont particulièrement intenses au début du cycle solaire, comme déjà observé entre 2009 et 2013, et comme attendu entre 2019 et 2023. Il est donc probable que les phénomènes extrêmes et les incendies de forêts se poursuivront dans les 2 ou 3 années qui viennent. 

Enfin, les différents phénomènes physiques évoqués se situent non pas dans un contexte de réchauffement, mais bien dans un contexte de refroidissement global qui a démarré avec le 21ème siècle (van Vliet 2020) et que le printemps froid et l’été pluvieux de 2021 rendent particulièrement visible en Belgique, en France, en Angleterre et en Allemagne.

Dans cet article, une analyse quantitative simple nous a conduit à la conclusion que les températures extrêmes et les feux de forêt sont d’origine naturelle : l’homme n’y est donc pour rien, sauf pour la gestion de la couverture végétale et … l’allumage. Il est faux de juger l’homme coupable comme le font systématiquement l’ONU et le GIEC.

Oser prétendre que la transition énergétique améliorera cette situation relève d’une alliance contre nature entre le monde politique, le marketing insensé des énergies renouvelables et la propagande écologiste.