by University of Texas at Austin, Mar 15, 2022 in ScienceDaily
The climate pattern El Niño varies over time to such a degree that scientists will have difficulty detecting signs that it is getting stronger with global warming.
That’s the conclusion of a study led by scientists at The University of Texas at Austin that analyzed 9,000 years of Earth’s history. The scientists drew on climate data contained within ancient corals and used one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers to conduct their research.
The study of the past, which was recently published in Science Advances, was motivated by the need to get a clearer picture of how climate change may affect El Niño in the future.
El Niño is the warm phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation, a climate phenomenon that sets the stage every few years for weather patterns worldwide. Strong El Niño events, such as the ones in 1997 and 2015 that brought wildfires to the rainforests of Borneo in Asia and caused widespread bleaching to the world’s coral reefs, happened about once a decade.
Computer models, however, are unclear about whether El Niño events will become weaker or stronger as the world warms due to climate change.
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by P. Gosselin, Mar 15, 2022 in NoTricksZone
4 recent studies tell us that forest thinning for the production of wood pellets and clear cutting for wind parks are really dumb ideas.
Reforestation and afforestation (R&A) are among the most prominent ideas for the sequestration of CO2 and thus viewed by alarmists as a climate solution. But others doubt forests play much of a role.
Wood pellets mean double barrel warming
Another solution proposed for climate protection is to burn wood pellets instead of oil and natural gas for heating buildings. Wood pellets are viewed as renewable and thus are supposed to be brakes on climate change. But now recent studies suggest that burning wood pellets coming from harvested trees in forest thinning operations may instead be accelerating warming.
HAT-TIP: Die kalte Sonne here.
Cloud–albedo effects due to land–atmosphere interactions
In their study, “Cloud cooling effects of afforestation and reforestation at midlatitudes” the team of authors led by Sara Cerasoli carefully analyzed R&A at midlatitudes. Using both satellite data and atmospheric boundary-layer models, they show that by including cloud–albedo effects due to land–atmosphere interactions, the R&A cooling at midlatitudes becomes prevalent.
This means that scientists earlier had not adequately taken the clouds that formed due to forests into account. These high albedo clouds play a major role in terms of having a cooling effect. Clouds tend to form more over intact forests than they do over forest-free areas.
Forests along with the clouds they help create, act to cool surface temperatures. Thus efforts to keep forests intact at midlatitudes would help cool the earth’s surface.
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La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse
