Meeting Plate Tectonics – Peter Molnar

by D. Fernandez-Blanco, November 20, 2018 in EGU


What do you think are the biggest challenges right now in your field?

Some of the challenges are too hard for me even to pursue them. In the climate world, we don’t know about the role of clouds. And I don’t know how to pursue this, so I don’t pursue it. Do clouds have a cooling effect, and what is the response from clouds to warming? Will they slow or accelerate the warming? We don’t know. The role of clouds is certainly a big, big question. Although I do not work on this, I think about it, but I don’t see what to do.

One of the problems I do work on is what brought us Ice Ages. How did we go through 300 My years without much ice in the northern hemisphere and then suddenly, beginning 3My years ago or so, we had 5 big Ice Ages? Why? An easy answer is that now CO2 is higher. But it’s really hard to measure, determining CO2 in the past is a big question.

Another big question for me is how does the convection in the mantle connect with deformation in the lithosphere? How do these connect to one another?

Carottes de glace, CO2 et micro-organismes

by Paul Berth, 22 novembre 2018, in ScienceClimatEnergie


Les microbulles de gaz emprisonnées dans les carottes de glace sont fréquemment utilisées pour estimer le taux de CO2 de l’atmosphère du passé. Il s’agit de méthodes de mesure indirectes. Par exemple la carotte de glace EPICA Dome C en Antarctique nous suggère que le CO2 de l’atmosphère a varié entre 180 et 300 ppmv pendant les derniers 650 000 ans (Brook 2005). Cependant, le taux de CO2 observé dans ces carottes de glace représente-il vraiment l’atmosphère du passé? Nous allons montrer ici qu’un paramètre est souvent négligé par les glaciologues, et que ce paramètre pourrait avoir un effet considérable sur le résultat des analyses : il s’agit de la présence de micro-organismes dans la glace et les microbulles.

2 More New Climate Reconstructions Indicate Rapid COOLING In The Last 100+ Years

by K. Richard, November 22, 2018 in NoTricksZone


The evidence that “global” warming has not been global in scale continues to accumulate.  Two more new reconstructions from the Western Pacific (He et al., 2018) and subpolar North Atlantic (Orme et al., 2018)  indicate that modern temperatures have continued to decline since the onset of the Little Ice Age.

These add to the nearly 300 graphs published in the scientific literature since 2017 showing that there is nothing unusual, unprecedented, or remarkable about the temperatures changes in the last 150 years.

Was Global Warming A Significant Factor in California’s Camp Fire? The Answer is Clearly No.

by Cliff Mass Weather and Climate Blog, November 20, 2018 in WUWT


The Camp Fire that struck the northern California town of Paradise and vicinity is a profoundly disturbing environmental disaster of first magnitude.  Nearly 100 people have lost their lives, approximately 10,000 homes have been lost, a major community has essentially been destroyed, and millions of people have been exposed to high concentrations of smoke.  Tens of thousands of people have been displaced and lives of millions substantially affected.

And beyond the heart-wrenching losses noted above, it is doubly tragic that this disaster was both foreseeable and avoidable, resulting from a series of errors, poor judgment, lack of use of available technology, and poor urban planning.
It is more than unfortunate that some politicians, environmental advocacy groups, and activist scientists are attempting to use this tragedy as a tool for their own agenda, make the claim that the Camp Fire was result of global warming.

Volcanoes and glaciers combine as powerful methane producers

by Lancaster University, November 20, 2018 in ScienceDaily


The Lancaster university-led research, which is featured in Scientific Reports, is the first published field study to show methane release from glaciers on this scale.

“This is a huge amount of methane lost from the glacial meltwater stream into the atmosphere,” said Dr Peter Wynn, a glacial biogeochemist from the Lancaster Environment Centre and corresponding author of the study. “It greatly exceeds average methane loss from non-glacial rivers to the atmosphere reported in the scientific literature. It rivals some of the world’s most methane-producing wetlands; and represents more than twenty times the known methane emissions of all Europe’s other volcanoes put together.”

Climate Scientists Reject Wind And Solar, Demand Nuclear-Powered Future

by Stop These Things, November 20, 2108 in ClimateChangeDispatch


In the climate alarmists’ worldwide crusade against carbon dioxide gas, only the most delusional still believe that wind and solar power add anything to their arsenal.

As we have said repeatedly, nuclear power is the only stand-alone power generation source which is capable of delivering power on demand, without CO2 emissions being generated in the process.

Perversely, notwithstanding that Australia is in the top three uranium exporters, it’s the only G20 country with a legislated prohibition on nuclear power generation…

The state of Shale Gas and Oil in the U.S.A. today

by Andy May, November 20, 2018 in WUWT


A few news items from The Shale Gas News, by Bill desRosiers of Cabot Oil & Gas. The main paragraphs below are adapted from desRosiers, but I’ve added some detail. Things are looking very good for the U.S. oil, gas and coal industries.

  • U.S. crude oil and natural gas production increased in 2017, with fewer wells. The total number of wells producing crude oil and natural gas in the United States fell to 991,000 in 2017, down from a peak of 1,039,000 wells in 2014. This recent decline in the number of wells reflects advances in technology and drilling techniques. EIA’s updated U.S. Oil and Natural Gas Wells by Production Rate report shows how daily production rates of individual wells contributed to U.S. total crude oil and natural gas production in 2017.

    The well efficiency gains, in part, reflect an increase in the proportion of horizontal wells. The number of vertical wells decreased from 940,000 in 2014 to 864,000 in 2017. The number of horizontal wells increased from 99,000 in 2014 to 127,000 in 2017, an increase of 28%. This is important since only one percent of vertical wells produce 100 barrels of oil per day (BOPD) or more, but 30% of horizontal wells do. Typically, a horizontal well costs about twice as much as a vertical well to the same reservoir.

    U.S. oil production grew from 10 million BOPD to 11 million BOPD between December 2017 and July 2018. Over the same period natural gas production grew from 97 BCF (billion cubic feet) to 100 BCF. Figures 1, 2, and 3 show the total number of wells drilled and the total oil and natural gas production.

Admitting mistakes in a ‘hostile environment’

by Judith Curry, November 19, 2018 in ClimateEtc.


Reflections on Nic Lewis’ audit of the Resplandy et al. paper.

In response to Nic Lewis’ two blog posts critiquing the Resplandy et al. paper on ocean temperatures, co-author Ralph Keeling acknowledges the paper’s errors with these statements:

Conclusions

By quickly admitting mistakes and giving credit where due, Ralph Keeling has done something unusual and laudatory in the field of climate science. If all climate scientists behaved this way, there would be no ‘hostile environment.’

I find it to be a sad state of affairs when a scientist admitting mistakes gets more kudos than the scientist actually finding the mistakes. But given the state of climate science, I guess finding mistakes seems to be a more common story than a publishing scientist actually admitting to mistakes.

Given the importance of auditing climate research  and independent climate scientists working outside of institutional frameworks, I wish there was some way to encourage more of this. In the absence of recognition and funding, I don’t have much to suggest

‘True polar wander’ may have caused ice age

by Rice University, November 19, 2018 in ScienceDaily


Their study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters is based on an analysis of fossil signatures from deep ocean sediments, the magnetic signature of oceanic crust and the position of the mantle “hot spot” that created the Hawaiian Islands. Co-authors Richard Gordon and Daniel Woodworth said the evidence suggests Earth spun steadily for millions of years before shifting relative to its spin axis, an effect geophysicists refer to as “true polar wander.”

“The Hawaiian hot spot was fixed, relative to the spin axis, from about 48 million years ago to about 12 million years ago, but it was fixed at a latitude farther north than we find it today,” said Woodworth, a graduate student in Rice’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences. “By comparing the Hawaiian hot spot to the rest of the Earth, we can see that that shift in location was reflected in the rest of the Earth and is superimposed on the motion of tectonic plates. That tells us that the entire Earth moved, relative to the spin axis, which we interpret to be true polar wander.”

First tally of US-Russia polar bears finds a healthy population

by University of Washington, November14, 2018 in EurekAlert


Not all polar bears are in the same dire situation due to retreating sea ice, at least not right now. Off the western coast of Alaska, the Chukchi Sea is rich in marine life, but the number of polar bears in the area had never been counted. The first formal study of this population suggests that it’s been healthy and relatively abundant in recent years, numbering about 3,000 animals.

The study by researchers at the University of Washington and federal agencies is published Nov. 14 in Scientific Reports, an open-access journal from the Nature Publishing Group.

“This work represents a decade of research that gives us a first estimate of the abundance and status of the Chukchi Sea subpopulation,” said first author Eric Regehr, a researcher with the UW’s Polar Science Center who started the project as a biologist in Alaska with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “Despite having about one month less time on preferred sea ice habitats to hunt compared with 25 years ago, we found that the Chukchi Sea subpopulation was doing well from 2008 to 2016.

#CampFire #WoolseyFire Blaming climate – ignoring incompetence

by Paul Driessen, November 18, 2018 in WUWT


Foreword:

Over 8,000 homes and businesses have been reduced to ashes and rubble by the latest California conflagrations. Well over 60 people have perished, over 50,000 are homeless, hundreds remain missing. “This is the new abnormal,” Governor Jerry Brown insists. “Dryness, warmth, drought, all those things are going to intensify,” because of climate change. Even if we do more on forest management, that won’t stop climate change. “And those who deny that are definitely contributing to the tragedies.”

Those assertions have no basis in fact. The hard, incontrovertible reality is that California has always been a largely arid state, afflicted by prolonged droughts, interspersed with periods of intense rainfall, and buffeted almost every autumn by strong winds that can whip forest fires into infernos. The problem isn’t climate change. It’s ideological, even criminally incompetent forest management practices demanded by politicians, regulators, judges and environmentalists in recent decades. My article presents the real story.

The Picasso Problem

by Willis Eschenbach, November 17, 2018 in WUWT


Let me start explaining the link from Picasso to climate science by looking at what Dr. Nir Shaviv called “the most boring graph I have ever plotted in my life”.

This is the graph of the changes in the best estimate of the range of what is called “climate sensitivity” over the last forty years or so.

What is climate sensitivity when it’s at home? To explain that, I’ll have to take a slight detour. First, downwelling radiation.

“Downwelling” in climate science means headed down towards the planetary surface. Downwelling radiation is the total radiation going downwards towards the surface. It is composed of sunshine (shortwave) plus thermal radiation from the atmosphere (longwave). In climate science, this quantity, total downwelling radiation, is called “forcing”, abbreviated “F”

The central paradigm of modern climate science is that if you change the amount of downwelling radiation (forcing), that the surface temperature perforce will change. The claim is that everything else averages out, and if the forcing increases, then surface temperature needs to change to maintain the global energy balance. It has to change. It must.

In short, the central paradigm of modern climate science is the following:

In the long run, global temperature change is proportional to global forcing change.

The putatively constant proportion between the two, which is the temperature change divided by forcing change, is called the “climate sensitivity”.

See also here

Climate, life and the movement of continents: New connections

by University of Texas at Austin, November 15, 2018 in ScienceDaily


A new study by The University of Texas at Austin has demonstrated a possible link between life on Earth and the movement of continents. The findings show that sediment, which is often composed of pieces of dead organisms, could play a key role in determining the speed of continental drift. In addition to challenging existing ideas about how plates interact, the findings are important because they describe potential feedback mechanisms between tectonic movement, climate and life on Earth.

The study, published Nov. 15 in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, describes how sediment moving under or subducting beneath tectonic plates could regulate the movement of the plates and may even play a role in the rapid rise of mountain ranges and growth of continental crust


 

Scientists” Determine That the Worst Year in Human History Was… 536 AD.

by David Middleton, November 17, 2018 in WUWT


Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’

By Ann Gibbons Nov. 15, 2018

 

Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he’s got an answer: “536.” Not 1349, when the Black Death wiped out half of Europe. Not 1918, when the flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, mostly young adults. But 536. In Europe, “It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year,” says McCormick, a historian and archaeologist who chairs the Harvard University Initiative for the Science of the Human Past.

A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. “For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year,” wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record “a failure of bread from the years 536–539.” Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.

Coral Adaptation and Epigenetics

by Rud Itsvan, November 17, 2018 in WUWT


WUWT has posted several excellent articles by Jim Steele on how global warming alarmism uses corals as the poster child for warming and acidifying oceans, none of which is scientifically justified. A brief review follows, calling attention to a recently discovered additional adaptation mechanism not covered AFAIK by Jim Steele’s posts. The motivation for this post was triggered by a recent lunch with newish neighbor Charles the Moderator (CtM), and his sharing many wonderful underwater photographs of the coral reef he now dives frequently off Pompano Beach (same reef system as off Fort Lauderdale, just a few miles further north and more conveniently onshore).

India’s Emissions Set To Double, As Coal Continues To Dominate

by P. Homewood, November 17, 2018 in NotalotofPeopleKnowThat


It’s worth taking a closer look at the claim made last week that India is leading the world in tackling climate change.

The claim was based on India’s latest National Electricity Plan (NEP), which was published in April 2018. Below is the current situation for installed capacity, according to the NEP:

L’astuce de la NOAA pour « réchauffer » la planète

by Les Blogs, 17 novembre 2018


D’abord cette info surprenante. Une étude récente sur le réchauffement des océans a dû être modifiée après publication dans Nature. L’étude, très alarmiste, avait pourtant été révisée puis validée par un comité de lecture et publiée dans la plus prestigieuse revue scientifique au monde. Or la méthodologie et les conclusions  de cette recherche étaient erronées.

La faille a été découverte par Nic Lewis, un chercheur climato-critique très populaire en Grande-Bretagne. Il affirme, et les faits lui donnent raison: « Je suis légèrement surpris que ni les pairs examinateurs ni le rédacteur en chef n’aient repéré ce qui me semblait être une alarme rouge à la page 1. »

Mapped: The world’s coal power plants

by CarbonBrief, June 5, 2018


Since 2000, the world has doubled its coal-fired power capacity to 2,000 gigawatts (GW) after explosive growth in China and India. Another 200GW is being built and 450GW is planned.

More recently, 200GW has closed due to a wave of retirements across the EU and US. Another 170GW is set to retire by 2030 and 13 of the world’s 77 coal-powered countries plan a total phaseout.

Meanwhile, electricity generated from coal peaked in 2014, so the expanding fleet is running fewer hours than ever. This erodes coal’s bottom line, as does competition from gas and renewables.

The way coal’s next chapter unfolds is key to tackling climate change. All unabated coal must close within a few decades if warming is to be limited to less than 2C above pre-industrial temperatures, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

To shed light on this story, Carbon Brief has mapped the past, present and future of all the world’s coal-fired power stations. The interactive timeline map, above, shows the plants operating in each year between 2000 and 2017, as well as the location of planned new capacity.

Using data from CoalSwarm’s Global Coal Plant Tracker, it features around 10,000 retired, operating and planned coal units, totalling nearly 3,000 gigawatts (GW) across 95 countries.

October 2018 Global Surface (Land+Ocean) and Lower Troposphere Temperature Anomaly Update Bob Tisdale

by Bob Tisdale, November 15, 2018 in WUWT


As you’ll soon see, there was an eye-catching uptick (+0.25 deg C) in the GISS global Land-Ocean Temperature Index (LOTI) data from September to October 2018. We’ll have to wait for next month’s update to see if it also appears in the NOAA and Met Office datasets.

Figure 8

There are numerous things to note in the trend comparison. First, there is a growing divergence between models and data starting in the early 2000s. The continued rise in the model trends indicates global surface warming is supposed to be accelerating, but the data indicate little to no acceleration since then. Second, the plateau in the data warming rates begins in the early 1990s, indicating that there has been very little acceleration of global warming for more than 2 decades. This suggests that there MAY BE a maximum rate at which surface temperatures can warm. Third, note that the observed 30-year trend ending in the mid-1940s is comparable to the recent 30-year trends. (That, of course, is a function of the new NOAA ERSST.v5 data used by GISS.) Fourth, yet that high 30-year warming ending about 1945 occurred without being caused by the forcings that drive the climate models. That is, the climate models indicate that global surface temperatures should have warmed at about a third that fast if global surface temperatures were dictated by the forcings used to drive the models. In other words, if the models can’t explain the observed 30-year warming ending around 1945, then the warming must have occurred naturally. And that, in turns, generates the question: how much of the current warming occurred naturally? Fifth, the agreement between model and data trends for the 30-year periods ending in the 1960s to about 2000 suggests the models were tuned to that period or at least part of it. Sixth, going back further in time, the models can’t explain the cooling seen during the 30-year periods before the 1920s, which is why they fail to properly simulate the warming in the early 20thCentury.

One last note, the monumental difference in modeled and observed warming rates at about 1945 confirms my earlier statement that the models can’t simulate the warming that occurred during the early warming period of the 20th Century.

Climate Alarmism Dies In 2018 As Modern Ice Melt, Sea Level Rise Has No Net Impact On World’s Coasts

by Kenneth Richard, November 15, 2018 in NoTricksZone


The year 2018 could mark the beginning of the end of climate change alarmist reporting.  Projections of catastrophic melting of the ice sheets and sea level rise swallowing up the Earth’s coasts are increasingly undermined by observation.

Despite the hackneyed practice of reporting “staggering” ice sheet melt for both Greenland and Antarctica in recent decades, the two polar ice sheets combined to add just 1.5 centimeters to sea level rise between 1958 and 2014 (graphfrom Frederikse et al., 2018) as global sea levels only rose by “1.5 ± 0.2 mm yr−1 over 1958–2014 (1σ)” or “1.3 ± 0.1 mm yr−1 for the sum of contributors”.

That’s about 7.8 centimeters (3.1 inches) of global sea level change in 56 years.

MATH ERROR: Scientists Admit ‘Mistakes’ Led To Alarming Results In Major Global Warming Study

by M. Bastasch, November 14, 2018 in WUWT/DailyCaller


  • Scientists behind a headline-grabbing climate study admitted they “really muffed” their paper.

  • Their study claimed to find 60 percent more warming in the oceans, but that was based on math errors.

  • The errors were initially spotted by scientist Nic Lewis, who called them “serious (but surely inadvertent) errors.”

The scientists behind a headline-grabbing global warming study did something that seems all too rare these days — they admitted to making mistakes and thanked the researcher, a global warming skeptic, who pointed them out.

“When we were confronted with his insight it became immediately clear there was an issue there,” study co-author Ralph Keeling told The San Diego Union-Tribune on Tuesday.

Their study, published in October, used a new method of measuring ocean heat uptake and found the oceans had absorbed 60 more heat than previously thought. Many news outlets relayed the findings, but independent scientist Nic Lewis quickly found problems with the study.

Keeling, a scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, owned up to the mistake and thanked Lewis for finding it. Keeling and his co-authors submitted a correction to the journal Nature. (RELATED: Headline-Grabbing Global Warming Study Suffers From A Major Math Error)

Calculating global temperature anomaly

by Nick Stokes, November 14, 2018 in WUWT


There is much criticism here of the estimates of global surface temperature anomaly provided by the majors – GISS, NOAA and HADCRUT. I try to answer these specifically, but also point out that the source data is readily available, and it is not too difficult to do your own calculation. I point out that I do this monthly, and have done for about eight years. My latest, for October, is here (it got warmer).

Last time CharlesTM was kind enough to suggest that I submit a post, I described how Australian data made its way, visible at all stages, from the 30-minute readings (reported with about 5 min delay) to the collection point as a CLIMAT form, from where it goes unchanged into GHCN unadjusted (qcu). You can see the world’s CLIMAT forms here; countries vary as to how they report the intermediate steps, but almost all the data comes from AWS, and is reported at the time soon after recording. So GHCN unadjusted, which is one of the data sources I use, can be verified. The other, ERSST v5, is not so easy, but there is a lot of its provenance available.

My calculation is based on GHCN unadjusted. That isn’t because I think the adjustments are unjustified, but rather because I find adjustment makes little difference, and I think it is useful to show that.

I’ll describe the methods and results, but firstly I should address that much-argued question of why use anomalies.

Shale Reservoirs, do they work, will they spread?

by Andy May, November 13, 2018 in WUWT


Popular accounts of shale oil and gas reservoirs are often riddled with errors and, even when technically correct, often misleading. As a shale petrophysicist, retired from Devon Energy, I thought I would try and explain, in a non-technical way, how these reservoirs work and why they have been so successful.

Figure 1. Major shale oil and gas plays in the United States. Source EIA.

La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse