climate-debate

The Climate Debate Twenty Years Later (recalling Houston’s 1999 conference)

by Robert Bradley Jr., March 7, 2019 in MasterResource

“Better climate knowledge about natural versus anthropogenic forcing seems to a decade away.” That was the major takeaway from a major 1999 climate conference in Houston, Texas as noted by Martin Cassidy of the Houston Geological Society, who  authored a conference summary, “Global Climate Change: Panel Agrees: ‘In 10 Years We Will Know‘.”

In fact, one of the conference participants, Gerald North, climatologist at Texas A&M, repeated this a decade after this conference. In his words:

In another decade of research we will have squared away a lot of our uncertainties about forced climate change. As this approaches we can be thinking about what to do if the warming does indeed appear to be caused by humans and to what extent things are changing as result. (North to Seldon B. Graham, Jr. January 6, 2010)

Now for Cassidy’s 1,000-word writeup. As you read this, ask yourself: what is really that different today, 20 years later, science-wise?

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climate-debate

Planet-Sized Experiments – we’ve already done the 2°C test

by Willis Eschenbach, March 17, 2019 inWUWT

People often say that we’re heading into the unknown with regards to CO2 and the planet. They say we can’t know, for example, what a 2°C warming will do because we can’t do the experiment. This is seen as important because for unknown reasons, people have battened on to “2°C” as being the scary temperature rise that we’re told we have to avoid at all costs.

But actually, as it turns out, we have already done the experiment. Below I show the Berkeley Earth average surface temperature record for Europe. Europe is a good location to analyze, because some of the longest continuous temperature records are from Europe. In addition, there are a lot of stations in Europe that have been taking record for a long time. This gives us lots of good data.

So without further ado, here’s the record of the average European temperature.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

An Analysis of the Recent Climate Change Hysteria

by Tim Ball, March 16, 2019 in WUWT

Most people were taken in by the false story of human-caused global warming. We can include all the students participating in the classroom walkout to demand governments stop climate change, organized by 16-year-old Greta Thunberg. Her goal is to keep global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Apparently, she has no idea that the temperature was near or above that level for most of the last 10,000-years in a period known as the Holocene Optimum.

They are taken in by the false claim that a minute amount of human-produced CO2 is effectively controlling the entire atmospheric system since 1950 and causing environmental collapse through global warming. They don’t know that there is an upper limit to the amount that CO2 can increase temperature. They don’t know that the average level of CO2 over the last 250 million years is 1200 ppm. They don’t know that every projection of temperature by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 1990 was wrong. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, how did so few, fool so many, to such an extent, for so long?

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climate-debate

GREENLAND ICE SHEET SIXTH HIGHEST ON RECORD

by GWPF, December 7, 2019

In 2018, Greenland’s total  surface mass budget (SMB) is almost 150bn tonnes above the average for 1981-2010, ranking as sixth highest on record.

 

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The Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) also performs daily simulations of how much ice or water the Ice Sheet loses or accumulates. Based on these simulations, an overall assessment of how the surface mass balance develops across the entire Ice Sheet is obtained (Fig. 4).

At the end of the 2018 season (31 August 2018), the net surface mass balance was 517 Gt, which means that 517 Gt more snow fell than the quantity of snow and ice that melted and ran out into the sea.

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energy and fields

Eni makes gas discovery in Nour prospect offshore Egypt

by Umar Ali, March 15, 2019 in OffshoreTechnology

Italian oil and gas company Eni has announced a new gas discovery under evaluation in the Nour exploration prospect offshore Egypt.

The prospect is located in the Nour North Sinai Concession in the Eastern Egyptian Mediterranean, 50km north of the Sinai Peninsula. The concession covers a total area of 739km2, with water depths ranging from 50-400m.

This latest discovery was made at the Nour-1 New Field Wildcat (NFW) exploratory well, which was drilled by the Scarabeo 9 semi-submersible unit in a water depth of 295m, reaching a total depth of 5,914m.

The well has not yet been tested, but Eni said it had carried out an “intense and accurate” data acquisition.

The NFW well found 33m of gross sandstone pay in the Tineh formation of Oligocene age with “good petrophysical properties” according to Eni, as well as an estimated gas column of 90m.

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climate and geology

Weird science: Tectonics in the tropics trigger Earth’s ice ages, study finds

by Anthony Watts, March 15, 2019 in WUWT

Over the last 540 million years, the Earth has weathered three major ice ages — periods during which global temperatures plummeted, producing extensive ice sheets and glaciers that have stretched beyond the polar caps.

Now scientists at MIT, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of California at Berkeley have identified the likely trigger for these ice ages.

In a study published in Science, the team reports that each of the last three major ice ages were preceded by tropical “arc-continent collisions” — tectonic pileups that occurred near the Earth’s equator, in which oceanic plates rode up over continental plates, exposing tens of thousands of kilometers of oceanic rock to a tropical environment.

The scientists say that the heat and humidity of the tropics likely triggered a chemical reaction between the rocks and the atmosphere. Specifically, the rocks’ calcium and magnesium reacted with atmospheric carbon dioxide, pulling the gas out of the atmosphere and permanently sequestering it in the form of carbonates such as limestone.

Over time, the researchers say, this weathering process, occurring over millions of square kilometers, could pull enough carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to cool temperatures globally and ultimately set off an ice age.

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climate and geology

Major cosmic impact 12,800 years ago

by James Kennett et al., March 13, 2019 in CO2Coalition

When UC Santa Barbara geology professor emeritus James Kennett and colleagues set out years ago to examine signs of a major cosmic impact that occurred toward the end of the Pleistocene epoch, little did they know just how far-reaching the projected climatic effect would be.

“It’s much more extreme than I ever thought when I started this work,” Kennett noted. “The more work that has been done, the more extreme it seems.”

He’s talking about the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, which postulates that a fragmented comet slammed into the Earth close to 12,800 years ago, causing rapid climatic changes, megafaunal extinctions, sudden human population decrease and cultural shifts and widespread wildfires (biomass burning). The hypothesis suggests a possible triggering mechanism for the abrupt changes in climate at that time, in particular a rapid cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, called the Younger Dryas, amid a general global trend of natural warming and ice sheet melting evidenced by changes in the fossil and sediment record.

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climate-debate

Exagérations climatiques extrêmes

by Jean N., 14 mars 2019 in ScienceClimatEnergie

Il ne se passe pas une journée sans que l’on entende ou lise dans les médias que le climat est “déréglé” et qu’il y a de plus en plus d’évènements climatiques extrêmes. Et de nombreux scientifiques semblent penser la même chose. Par exemple, une pétition publiée fin janvier 2019 et signée par 3400 scientifiques belges, déclare au point 3 : “Le seul réchauffement actuel de 1°C entraîne déjà une augmentation de l’occurrence et de l’intensité des extrêmes climatiques tels que les canicules, les sécheresses ou encore les inondations.” Aucune référence n’est malheureusement donnée par les signataires de la pétition… Ces phénomènes climatiques sont-ils exagérés? Consultons donc le dernier rapport du GIEC, l’AR5 publié en 2013, et particulièrement le chapitre 2 qui traite des évènements climatiques extrêmes (depuis 2013, le GIEC n’a plus rien publié d’aussi complet sur le sujet). Préparez-vous à être surpris!

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Figure 1. Extrait de la Table SPM.1 concernant les évènements climatiques extrêmes dans le résumé pour décideurs du rapport AR5 du GIEC. Sur 9 phénomènes climatiques extrêmes seulement 5 sont présentés dans la table par le GIEC. Le texte noir sont des conclusions tirées par l’AR5. Les textes en rouge et en bleu sont des conclusions plus anciennes (AR4 et rapport SREX). A droite, “OK Ch.2” indique que le résumé est correct par rapport au texte; le triangle rouge “attention”, indique que des informations importantes sont manquantes et peuvent induire en erreur.

climate-debate

Greenland’s Glaciers Expanding Again

by P. Homewood, March 11, 2019 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

As I reported last  September, Greenland’s ice sheet mass balance had grown at close to record levels for the second year running.

To clarify again, the mass balance calculation accounts for:

1) Snowfall

2) Ice melt

3) Ablation

 

In other words, it does not include calving.

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http://www.dmi.dk/en/groenland/maalinger/greenland-ice-sheet-surface-mass-budget/#

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energy and fields

China Says Massive Shale Oil Reserves Found In North

by Tsvetana Paraskova, March 1, 2019 in OilPrice

China has found massive shale oil reserves in its northern Tianjin municipality, Chinese news agency Xinhua reported on Friday.

Two wells at a field have been flowing for more than 260 days, according to Dagang Oilfield, a subsidiary of state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC).

The newly found shale reserves will help boost China’s national energy security and economic development, Xinhua quoted CNPC as saying.

According to EIA estimates, China ranks third in the world in terms of technically recoverable shale oil resources, behind Russia and the United States

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Emails reveal how children become pawns of climate alarmism

by Anthony Watts, March 13, 2019 in WUWT

Genesis of a Shakedown: New Records Expose Children’s Marches as Long-Planned Component of Litigation Campaign

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These public records produced mere days after 60 Minutes’s promotional segment, and days before the nationwide children’s climate walkouts, affirm:

  • the climate litigation campaign was expressly grounded in this failure of “conventional approaches” otherwise known as our constitutional system

  • it was to be “linked to youth climate movement (world-wide marches)”;

  • it would be accompanied by a press strategy including documentaries featuring children;

  • the meeting was acknowledged, but this strategy laid out there was “not to be publicized”;

  • the strategy sought both a cooperative federal administration “Consent decrees (would be ideal)” — and to “Bring selected carbon majors to the table, then what?”

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climate-debate

CA sea level rise alarmist study ignores 30 years of NOAA data with no coastal sea level rise acceleration

by Larry Hamlin, March 13, 2019 in WUWT

NOAA tide gauge data measurements exist for 17 locations along the California coast with 8 of these locations having actual measured sea level rise data covering periods for more than 70 to 120 years in duration.

This measured data shows that none of these California locations are experiencing coastal sea level rise acceleration since climate alarmist first made such erroneous and flawed sea level acceleration claims before the U.S. Senate in 1988.

Climate alarmists and their supporting media conveniently conceal the fact that their flawed claims have been hyped for the last 30 years as they continue to try again and again to make the same repeated but flawed claims apparently hoping that the public will forget their long track record of failure and exaggeration.

NOAA measured tide gauge data shows that coastal sea level rise at Ca. locations varies between 3 to 12 inches per century and have remained at those levels during the long measurement periods during which actual measured data have been recorded with a sample of that measured data shown below for San Diego, La Jolla, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Polar bear habitat update: abundant sea ice across the Arctic, even in the Barents Sea

by Polar Bear Science, March 12, 2019

Abundant ice in Svalbard, East Greenland and the Labrador Sea is excellent news for the spring feeding season ahead because this is when bears truly need the presence of ice for hunting and mating. As far as I can tell, sea ice has not reached Bear Island, Norway at this time of year since 2010 but this year ice moved down to the island on 3 March and has been there ever since. This may mean we’ll be getting reports of polar bear sightings from the meteorological station there, so stay tuned.


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better to know...?

Monster solar storm that hit Earth discovered in the past

by Anthony Watts, March 12, 2019 in WUWT

Something this big today would surely fry electrical grids, GPS, and communications. It may be bigger than the Carrington Solar event of 1859.

Scientists have found evidence of a huge blast of radiation from the Sun that hit Earth more than 2,000 years ago. The result has important implications for the present, because solar storms can disrupt modern technology.

The team found evidence in Greenland ice cores that the Earth was bombarded with solar proton particles in 660BC. The event was about 10 times more powerful than any since modern instrumental records began.

The Sun periodically releases huge blasts of charged particles and other radiation that can travel towards Earth.

The particular kind of solar emission recorded in the Greenland ice is known as a solar proton event (SPE). In the modern era, when these high-energy particles collide with Earth, they can knock out electronics in satellites we rely on for communications and services such as GPS.

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climate-debate

The Role of Sulfur Dioxide Aerosols in Climate Change

by Buel Henry, May 26, 2015 in WUWT

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Anthropogenic emissions of SO2 into the troposphere peaked during year 1972 at about 131 Megatonnes. By year 2000, due to worldwide Clean Air Act efforts, SO2 emissions in the West had decreased by approximately 48 Megatonnes. However, during the same time period, emissions elsewhere rose by 23 Megatonnes, for a net worldwide decrease of 25 Megatonnes.

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Figure 1: Global sulfur dioxide emissions by region (North Amer- ica = USA,Canada; East Asia, Japan, China, and South Korea). J.Smith et al., Fig 6.

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It also proves that the IPCC “Graph of Radiative Forcings” is completely incorrect, since it does not include any warming due to the removal of dimming-aerosols from the atmosphere. To be correct, this forcing needs to be included (which will have the effect of completely eliminating any forcing due to CO2). As noted above, all of the warming can be accounted for by the reduction in SO2 emissions.

energy and fields

America is set to surpass Saudi Arabia in a ‘remarkable’ oil milestone

by Charles the moderator, March 11, 2019 in WUWT

From CNN Business

New York (CNN Business)Move over, Saudi Arabia. America is about to steal the kingdom’s energy exporting crown.

The United States will surpass Saudi Arabia later this year in exports of oil, natural gas liquids and petroleum products, like gasoline, according to energy research firm Rystad Energy.

That milestone, driven by the transformative shale boom, would make the United States the world’s leading exporter of oil and liquids. That has never happened since Saudi Arabia began selling oil overseas in the 1950s, Rystad said in a report Thursday.

“It’s nothing short of remarkable,” said Ryan Fitzmaurice, energy strategist at Rabobank. “Ten years ago, no one thought it could happen.”

The expected breakthrough reflects how technology has reshaped the global energy landscape. Drilling innovations have opened up huge swaths of oil and natural gas resources that had been trapped in shale oilfields in Texas, North Dakota and elsewhere.

Led by shale, US oil production has more than doubled over the past decade to all-time highs. The United States now pumps more oil than any other country, including Russia and Saudi Arabia.

“The shale boom has driven incredible increases in production,” said Fitzmaurice. “US production is off the charts.”

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climate-debate

New Paper: Widespread Collapse Of Ice Sheets ~5000 Years Ago Added 3-4 Meters To Rising Seas

by K. Richard, March 11, 2019 in NoTricksZone

During the Mid-Holocene, when CO2 concentrations were stable and low (270 ppm), Antarctica’s massive Ross Ice Shelf naturally collapsed, adding the meltwater equivalent of 3-4 meters to sea levels.

Because CO2 concentrations changed very modestly during the pre-industrial Holocene (approximately ~25 ppm in 10,000 years), climate models that are predicated on the assumption that CO2 concentration changes drive ocean temperatures, ice sheet melt, and sea level rise necessarily simulate a very stable Holocene climate.

In contrast, changes in ocean temperatures, ice sheet melt, and sea level rise rates were far more abrupt and variable during the Holocene than during the last 100 years.

Modern ocean changes are barely detectable in the context of natural variability

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Image Source(s): Rosenthal et al., 2013; Climate Audit

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energy and fields

Another Failed Energy Prediction: Peak Oil Demand

by David Middleton, March 11, 2019 in WUWT

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Jude Clemente’s energy articles on Real Clear Energy and Forbes are always worth reading.

Key takeaways:

  1. Major oil company (particularly European majors) predictions of a near-term peak in oil demand are 99.999% driven by politics and the need to appease the investment community.
  2. According to baseball legend, the late, great Yogi Berra, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” So, make sure your timeline is long enough to evade having to take responsibility for failed predictions.
  3. Malthuisan predictions have a 100% track record of being wrong.
  4. As these United States become a net exporter of crude oil in the near future, we will have no problem finding customers.

Here are the graphs from Mr. Clemente’s article:

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Figure 2. US Energy Information Administration (EIA) 2019 global petroleum liquids demand forecast.
climate-debate

Henrik Svensmark: Force Majeure – The Sun’s Role In Climate Change (PDF)

in GWPF, March 11, 2019

London, 11 March: A new report from the Global Warming Policy Foundation reveals that the solar influence on climate is is much larger than is generally recognised.

The report, by Professor Henrik Svensmark of the Danish National Space Institute, outlines some of the remarkable correlations between solar activity and past climate changes. It also shows that the output of the Sun alone – the so-called total solar irradiance – cannot explain them.

“Changes in total solar irradiance are actually quite small”, says Professor Svensmark. “They would have to be nearly 10 times larger to explain how the oceans warm and cool over the 11-year solar cycle.”

New research suggests that other mechanisms can amplify the effect of solar activity. The New report reviews the possible candidates, concluding that the most likely of these is the effects of galactic cosmic rays on cloud formation. This idea is plausible in theory and has received substantial empirical support in recent years.

However, Professor Svensmark says that insufficient attention is being paid to this research area:

“Galactic cosmic rays seem to be very important drivers of the Earth’s climate. But they are mostly being ignored at the moment because they are seen as distracting from conventional global warming research. Science needs to do better if we want to make progress in understanding the actual impact of natural factors of climate change.”

Henrik Svensmark: Force Majeure – The Sun’s Role In Climate Change (PDF)

About the author
Prof Henrik Svensmark is a physicist and a senior researcher in the Astrophysics and Atmospheric Physics Division of the National Space Institute (DTU Space) in Lyngby, Denmark. Svensmark presently leads the Sun–Climate Research group at DTU Space.
climate-debate

CHINA AND THE PAUSE

by GWPF, March 8, 2019

Chinese climate scientists are clearly off-message. They keep referring to the global warming hiatus which so many scientists and activists – those who shout on twitter and prowl the comment sections of off-colour articles on the subject – know has been trounced and discredited again and again. They clearly ought to have a word with the emerging science powerhouse that is China.

Writing recently in “Science of The Total Environment,” Li and Zha of Nanjing Normal University, say the global hiatus has played a prominent role in their thinking and they see it reflected in China. Using satellite data they found a hiatus in China between 2001-15. They found warming in western and southern China and a 15-year cooling trend in northern China. For China as a whole they estimate that the warming rate is just -0.02°C per decade. The conclude that, “there is a regional warming hiatus, a pause or slowdown in China, and (it) implies that greenhouse gas induced warming is suppressed by other natural forcing in the early 21st century.”

There is also Li et al writing in Climate Dynamics who are a little more forceful saying, “since the late 1990s, the global warming has ground to a halt, which has sparked a rising interest among the climate scientists. The hiatus is not only observed in globally average surface air temperature, but also in the China winter air temperature trend, which turns from warming during 1979-1997 to cooling during 1998-2013.” They attribute the effect to the melting of Arctic sea ice.

Gan et al (Lanzhou University and South Dakota State University), reporting in Earth and Space Science say that the hiatus, if not cooling, is seen over the Northern Hemisphere finding that the daily temperature minimum experienced an “obvious” decline in North America during the warming slowdown period. They relate the changes in daily temperature minimum to the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation.

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Biodiversity, biology+acidification, climate-debate

Global Warming off the hook? Alien species are primary cause of recent global extinctions

by University College London, March 3, 2019 in WUWT

Alien species are the main driver of recent extinctions in both animals and plants, according to a new study by UCL researchers.

They found that since 1500, alien species have been solely responsible for 126 extinctions, 13% of the total number studied.

Of 953 global extinctions, 300 happened in some part because of alien species, and of those 300, 42% had alien species alone listed as the cause of their demise.

The study, published today in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, used data from the 2017 IUCN Red List on the total numbers of species that are considered to have gone extinct globally since 1500.

In total, 261 out of 782 animal species (33.4%) and 39 out of 153 plant species (25.5%) listed aliens as one of their extinction drivers. In contrast, native species impacts were associated with only 2.7% of animal extinctions and 4.6% of plant extinctions.

 

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climate-debate

2019 GLOBAL TEMPS PREDICTION: THE ENTRIES ARE IN

by GWPF, March 6, 2019

The Met Office says it’s going to get warmer this year. GWPF readers reckon not.

Back in early February, we invited readers to submit their entries for our 2019 global temperature prediction competition. The GWPF posse had soundly beaten the Met Office in last year’s competition, and you certainly seemed encouraged by your success, as there were 250 entries this time round, more than double last year’s entry.

For 2019, the Met Office have once again pushed the boat out on their predictions, suggesting that we might see a temperature rise of 0.19°C by the year end.

As you can see from the graph below, GWPF readers are a lot more cautious. The graph is a histogram of the entries, so the height of each blue bar is the number of readers making a particular prediction, the temperatures being given in terms of anomalies from the 1961-1990 average. The most common prediction was therefore for a slight decline in temperature over the course of the year, down to to 0.55°C from last year’s 0.6°C. The Met Office prediction is the grey band – they have given a single value this time round, rather than the range given in previous years.

better to know...?, climate-debate

A Month Without Sunspots

by Dr Tony Phillips, March 6, 2019 in SpaceWeatherArchive

March 1, 2019: There are 28 days in February. This year, all 28 of them were spotless. The sun had no sunspots for the entire month of Feb. 2019. This is how the solar disk looked every day:

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How does this affect us on Earth? The biggest change may be cosmic rays. High energy particles from deep space penetrate the inner solar system with greater ease during periods of low solar activity. Indeed, NASA spacecraft and space weather balloons are detecting just such an increase in radiation. Cosmic rays can alter the flow of electricity through Earth’s atmosphere, trigger lightning, potentially alter cloud cover, and dose commercial air travelers with extra “rads on a plane.”

As February ended, March is beginning … with no sunspots. Welcome to Solar Minimum!

better to know...?, climate-debate

CLIMATE SCIENTIST NIC LEWIS: ‘EUROPEAN CO2 EMISSIONS DON’T MATTER’

by Edwin Timmer, March 9, 2019 in GWPF

“What really matters is: what happens in developing countries such as China, India, Indonesia, Brazil and Nigeria”, says Lewis, who gave a presentation at De Groene Rekenkamer Foundation this week in Amsterdam. According to him, it is much more important that developing countries quickly become richer and how rising CO2 emissions that this entails can be limited.

“We have a lot of knowledge and expertise in Europe. We can spend our money better than investing billions in subsidies and other climate policies that have virtually no effect on global emissions.”

Lewis would prefer to see investments in the development of clean nuclear energy or techniques to get CO2 out of the air and shut down coal-fired plants. “That could then be rolled out over the rest of the world.”

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unclassified

Circular reasoning with climate models

by Dr. Wojick, March 1, 2018 in CFact

Climate models play a central role in the attribution of global warming or climate change to human causes. The standard argument takes the following form: “We can get the model to do X, using human causes, but not without them, so human causes must be the cause of X.” A little digging reveals that this is actually a circular argument, because the models are set up in such a way that human causes are the only way to get change.

The finding is that humans are the cause of global warming and climate change is actually the assumption going in. This is circular reasoning personified, namely conclude what you first assume.

This circularity can be clearly seen in what many consider the most authoritative scientific report on climate change going, although it is actually just the most popular alarmist report. We are talking about the Summary for Policymakers (SPM), of the latest assessment report (AR5), of the heavily politicized UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Their 29 page AR5 SPM is available here.

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40387018 – the raging whirlpool

La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse