Few things illustrate the poor state of the communication of climate science better than the reaction to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt’s comments about global temperatures in the past 20 years. It was made in written comments to the Senate following his confirmation hearing. He wrote, “over the past two decades satellite data indicates there has been a leveling off of warming.” Has the temperature increase of the Earth’s surface and lower atmosphere “stalled” in the past 20 years or so? Does this change our view of climate change?
Yes, Arctic sea ice has declined since satellite records began in 1979 but polar bears have adjusted well to this change, especially to the abrupt decline to low summer sea ice levels that have been the norm since 2007. Some polar bear subpopulations have indeed spent more time on land in summer than in previous decades but this had little negative impact on health or survival and while polar bear attacks on humans appear to have increased in recent years (Wilder et al. 2017), the reasons for this are not clear: reduced summer sea ice is almost certainly not the causal factor (see previous post here).
Large, robust, lens-shaped microfossils from the approximately 3.4 billion-year-old Kromberg Formation of the Kaapvaal Craton in eastern South Africa are not only among the oldest elaborate microorganisms known, but are also related to other intricate microfossils of the same age found in the Pilbara Craton of Australia, according to an international team of scientists.
The level of renewable use is now so high in Germany that serious electric grid reliability and stability issues now exist which require both fossil power plant emergency backup for failed renewable production and dictate rejecting renewable energy to ensure operation of fossil plants required for electric grid reliability and stability.
Over at Dr. Curry’s excellent website, she’s discussing the Red and Blue Team approach. If I ran the zoo and could re-examine the climate question, I’d want to look at what I see as the central misunderstanding in the current theory of climate.
This is the mistaken idea that changes in global temperature are a linear function of changes in the top-of-atmosphere (TOA) radiation balance (usually called “forcing”).
I thought I’d take a moment from my R&R to write about all the hullabaloo surrounding the calving of the large iceberg off the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica. First, a few of the headlines:
On Wednesday, Premier Oil Plc, Sierra Oil & Gas and Talos Energy LLC announced the first Mexican discovery by explorers other than state-owned Pemex in 80 years, a reservoir with an estimated 1.4 billion to 2 billion barrels
Progressive bottom melting and break-up of West Antarctica’s seafloor hugging Larsen Ice Shelf is fueled by heat and heated fluid flow from numerous very active geological features, and not climate change.
A new opinion poll of 10,000 European citizens reveals majority of Europeans reject the claim that climate change is mainly or entirely caused by humans.
For the last few decades, questions about the causes and impacts of climate change have dominated the climate debate. The IPCC and many climate scientists have been claiming relentlessly that the global warming trend since the second half of the 20th century is mainly if not entirely man-made, i.e. as a result of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. This dogma is habitually claimed to be the global climate consensus.
When considering the scale of temperature changes that alarmists anticipate because of Man-made Global Warming and their view of the disastrous effects of additional Man-made Carbon Dioxide emissions in this century, it is useful to look at climate change from a longer term, century by century and even on a millennial perspective.
This recent post was on the fact that the Sun’s EUV emissions had fallen to solar minimum-like levels well ahead of solar minimum. The implication was that the Solar Cycle 24/25 minimum was either going to be very deep and prolonged, or that Solar Cycle 24 would be very short, which in turn would be strange for a weak cycle.
It’s official. According to a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports,Greenland has been cooling slightly since 2005.
This trend development may be a harbinger of what may be in store for the coming years. Shifts in North Atlantic temperatures typically lead changes in the Arctic by a few years. And throughout the North Atlantic, rapid cooling has been underway since 2005, plunging below the levels reached in the 1950s
Global energy investment fell by 12% in 2016, the second consecutive year of decline, as increased spending on energy efficiency and electricity networks was more than offset by a continued drop in upstream oil and gas spending, according to the International Energy Agency’s annual World Energy Investmentreport.
Global energy investment amounted to USD 1.7 trillion in 2016, or 2.2% of global GDP. For the first time, spending on the electricity sector around the world exceeded the combined spending on oil, gas and coal supply. The share of clean-energy spending reached 43% of total supply investment, a record high.
Hubbert’s fame in peak oil circles comes primarily from the assertion that he accurately predicted the 1970 U.S. peak. Because of this prediction, Hubbert is widely-regarded among peak oil adherents as a visionary. He has been called an oracle and a prophet. A recently published article — What Hubbert And Pickens Got Right About Oil, And What’s Next — recounts the uncanny accuracy of his prediction.
Source: Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels by M. King Hubbert
La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse
