by Donna Laframboise, January 26, 2018 in BigPictureNews
BIG PICTURE: In 1995, a 40-year-old climate modeller named Ben Santer was in charge of Chapter 8 of the UN’s upcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. Nothing in the other 49 chapters mattered more than the question his team was expected to answer: Was global climate change wholly natural – or was it partially caused by human activity?
by Cornell University, January 25, 2018 in ScienceDaily
Plastics make ideal vessels for colonizing microscopic organisms that could trigger disease if they come into contact with corals,” Lamb said. “Plastic items — commonly made of polypropylene, such as bottle caps and toothbrushes — have been shown to become heavily inhabited by bacteria
by Paul Homewood, January 25, 2018 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
So I thought I would do some digging into the actual temperature data, to see if NOAA’s version stacks up. I promise that you will be astounded at the results! (…)
by E. Garnier, septembre 2012, in Risques, les Cahiers de l’Assurance
Ce travail tente de prouver l’intérêt pour l’assureur d’une approche historique consacrée aux tempêtes et aux cyclones entre 1500 et nos jours. Les exemples de la France, de l’Europe et de l’océan Indien montrent que ces événements extrêmes sont en réalité des facteurs de permanence historique et que les archives peuvent être très utiles pour estimer leur sévérité. Dans cette perspective, une simulation du coût actuel de la tempête atlantique de mars 1937 est réalisée. Elle révèle que les sociétés littorales de cette époque étaient nettement plus résilientes. Enfin, l’étude prouve que, depuis la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, la vulnérabilité a augmenté plus rapidement que l’aléa tempête, notamment depuis les années 1990 avec l’urbanisation croissante des littoraux.
by T. Girona, C. Huber, C. Caudron, January 24, 2018 in Nature
A long-standing question in Earth Science is the extent to which seismic and volcanic activity can be regulated by tidal stresses, a repeatable and predictable external excitation induced by the Moon-Sun gravitational force. Fortnightly tides, a ~14-day amplitude modulation of the daily tidal stresses that is associated to lunar cycles, have been suggested to affect volcano dynamics. However, previous studies found contradictory results and remain mostly inconclusive. Here we study how fortnightly tides have affected Ruapehu volcano (New Zealand) from 2004 to 2016 by analysing the rolling correlation between lunar cycles and seismic amplitude recorded close to the crater. (…)
by Willis Eschenbach, January 24, 2018 in WUWT
(…) I like the TAO buoy data because we can be sure that it is free of urban heat islands, changes in location, instrumentation changes, and many of the other problems that plague land-based stations. It is also measured very frequently, typically every ten minutes. This lets us explore the daily cycles of air and sea temperature, solar radiation, longwave radiation, humidity, and the like.
by Dr Benny Peiser, January 24, 2018 in ClimateChangeDispatch
The solar variability is not negligible in comparison with the energy imbalance that drives global temperature change.
Therefore, because of the combination of the strong 2016 El Niño and the phase of the solar cycle, it is plausible, if not likely, that the next 10 years of global temperature change will leave an impression of a ‘global warming hiatus.’ —James Hansen et al, 18 January 2018
The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) has lodged a new complaint with the BBC about its misleading reporting on global warming.
See also here
by K. Richard, January 24, 2018 in NoTricksZone
A few years ago, 10 glaciologists publishing in the journal Nature Geoscience asserted that “large parts of the north-central Greenland ice sheet are melting from below” due to high geothermal heat flux forcing (Rogozhina et al., 2016).
In a new paper published in Scientific Reports, 4 more glaciologists (Rysgaardet al., 2018) report that “hot vents” (or hot springs) of geothermally-heated water underneath the Greenland ice sheet can explain localized rising temperatures and glacial melting.
by FLORIDA MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY, January 23, 2018, in WUWT, A. Watts
The researchers published their findings this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Scientists frequently look to the Eocene to understand how the Earth responds to higher levels of carbon dioxide. During the Eocene, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was more than 560 parts per million, at least twice preindustrial levels, and the epoch kicked off with a global average temperature more than 8 degrees Celsius – about 14 degrees Fahrenheit – warmer than today, gradually cooling over the next 22 million years. These characteristics make the Eocene a good period on which to test our understanding of the climate system, said Laura Cotton, study co-author and curator of micropaleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History.
by A. Préat et al., 22 janvier 2018, in Arguments
Ce numéro spécial de la revue “Arguments” est dédié à la mémoire d’István Markó, professeur à l’UCL, décédé inopinément en août 2017. Au cours des dix dernières années cet éminent scientifique a consacré toute son énergie et utilisé ses très grandes compétences à l’analyse des données expérimentales et théoriques concernant l’évolution du climat pour arriver à la conclusion que la théorie du réchauffement climatique d’origine anthropique était non fondée. Toute cette théorie aux conséquences politiques, économiques et sociales gigantesques repose sur une seule et fragile hypothèse : le CO2 renverrait vers la Terre une partie du rayonnement qui devrait s’échapper vers le vide interplanétaire et il en résulterait une élévation de température. Or, il n’existe aucune preuve scientifique liant un réchauffement climatique à une augmentation de la teneur en CO2 dans l’atmosphère.
by P.M. Cox et al., January 18, 2018 in Nature
Equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) remains one of the most important unknowns in climate change science. ECS is defined as the global mean warming that would occur if the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration were instantly doubled and the climate were then brought to equilibrium with that new level of CO2.
(…)
This metric of variability can also be calculated from observational records of global warming3, which enables tighter constraints to be placed on ECS, reducing the probability of ECS being less than 1.5 degrees Celsius to less than 3 per cent, and the probability of ECS exceeding 4.5 degrees Celsius to less than 1 per cent.
by P. Gosselin, January 20, 2018 in NoTricksZone
It has long been dawning on most people that the costs of Germany’s Energiewende (transition to green energies) have been spectacularly underestimated. As Germany rushes into its foray with renewable energies, principally wind and sun, we are finding out that many of the costs involved were never taken into account.
(…)
by Willis Eschenbach, January 20, 2018 in WUWT
Well, my old index to my posts was out of date, and I finally got tired of not being able to find things that I’ve written. This is me trying to figure it out.
So I wrote a program in the computer language “R”. It takes as input a list of URLs of my writings, and it goes and scrapes each post. As output it gives me the name of the post, the category if any, and the first few lines of text.
by Tim Ball, January 20, 2108
The short answer to the question posed in the title to this article is virtually and practically nothing. They definitely do not tell us what is claimed, that is, accurate representation of the state of the atmosphere including temperature in individual years. This is why one of the world’s experts on atmospheric chemistry and ice cores Zbigniew Jaworowski M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc., wrote,
“It was never experimentally demonstrated that ice core records reliably represent the original atmospheric composition.”
(…)
by P Gosselin, January 19, 2018 in NoTricksZone
In Germany there is one weather station that has be intact and unchanged for some 138 years.
It has never been moved and never been corrupted by the urban heat island (UHI) effect. Moreover it has consistently used the same instrumentation and computation method over the entire period, thus making it rare indeed. Few station can boast having those instrumentation qualities.
That measurement station is one operated at the Klostergarten of the St. Stephan Abbey in Augsburg just northwest of Munich.
by Anthony Watts, January 19, 2018, from NASA in WUWT
From NASA Goddard:
Earth’s global surface temperatures in 2017 ranked as the second warmest since 1880, according to an analysis by NASA (…)
See also here
by P. Homewood, January 18, 2018 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
The topic of how the US temperature record has been massively altered in recent years has been well covered by Tony Heller, myself and others in the past.
Nevertheless it is worth summarising again.
(…)
by W.J. Davis et al., January 8, 2018 in Climate
We report a previously-unexplored natural temperature cycle recorded in ice cores from Antarctica—the Antarctic Centennial Oscillation (ACO)—that has oscillated for at least the last 226 millennia. Here we document the properties of the ACO and provide an initial assessment of its role in global climate.
See also here
by UC San Diego, January 4, 2018
There is a new way to measure the average temperature of the ocean thanks to researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego. In an article published in the Jan. 4, 2018, issue of the journal Nature, geoscientist Jeff Severinghaus and colleagues at Scripps Oceanography and institutions in Switzerland and Japan detailed their ground-breaking approach.
by Princeton University, January 10, 2018 in WUWT
Princeton University researchers have found that the climate models scientists use to project future conditions on our planet underestimate the cooling effect that clouds have on a daily — and even hourly — basis, particularly over land.
The researchers report in the journal Nature Communications Dec. 22 that models tend to factor in too much of the sun’s daily heat, which results in warmer, drier conditions than might actually occur. The researchers found that inaccuracies in accounting for the diurnal, or daily, cloud cycle did not seem to invalidate climate projections, but they did increase the margin of error for a crucial tool scientists use to understand how climate change will affect us.
by Dr David Whitehouse, January 17, 2018 in GWPF
It is clear that 2017 was a very warm year. Tomorrow, NOAA, NASA and the UK Met Office will announce by how much. It won’t be a record-breaker, but it will be in the top five, and that has already started comments about why it has been so hot. After all, the record-setting El Niño temperatures of the 2015-16 are over – so why did it remain so hot? The reason, according to some, is clear: the resurgence of global warming. The year 2017 is the hottest non-El Niño year ever and therefore signifies a dramatic increase of global warming after 20-years or so when the global temperature hasn’t done very much.
See also here
by Tevor Nace, November 20, 2017 in WhoaScience
Scientists have found strong evidence that 2018 will see a big uptick in the number of large earthquakes globally. Earth’s rotation, as with many things, is cyclical, slowing down by a few milliseconds per day then speeding up again.
You and I will never notice this very slight variation in the rotational speed of Earth. However, we will certainly notice the result, an increase in the number of severe earthquakes.
Geophysicists are able to measure the rotational speed of Earth extremely precisely, calculating slight variations on the order of milliseconds. Now, scientists believe a slowdown of the Earth’s rotation is the link to an observed cyclical increase in earthquakes.
by Paul Gosselin, January 12, 2018 in NoTricksZone
Quartz.com here presents an interesting chart which tells us the green energy revolution of the past 30 years has resulted in practically nothing. It’s been a flop. Fossil fuels remain as wildly popular as ever.
by Paul Homewood, March 27, 2014 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
NCDC have introduced a new method this month of calculating state, (but not national) temperatures in the US.
by Columbia University, February 5, 2015
Vast ranges of volcanoes hidden under the oceans are presumed by scientists to be the gentle giants of the planet, oozing lava at slow, steady rates along mid-ocean ridges. But a new study shows that they flare up on strikingly regular cycles, ranging from two weeks to 100,000 years—and, that they erupt almost exclusively during the first six months of each year. The pulses—apparently tied to short- and long-term changes in earth’s orbit, and to sea levels–may help trigger natural climate swings. Scientists have already speculated that volcanic cycles on land emitting large amounts of carbon dioxide might influence climate; but up to now there was no evidence from submarine volcanoes. The findings suggest that models of earth’s natural climate dynamics, and by extension human-influenced climate change, may have to be adjusted