Archives mensuelles : février 2025

better to know...?, climate-debate

Climate Whiplash and California Wildfires

by R. Caiazza, Feb 2, 2025 in WUWT

The difference between weather and climate is constantly mistaken by climate change advocates Recently Southern California wildfires have been blamed on climate change.  Patrick Brown addressed the question how much did “Climate Whiplash” impact the Los Angeles fires.  His excellent analysis raises concerns that I want to highlight.

Weather vs. Climate

Every time there is an extreme weather event proponents for eliminating fossil fuels confuse weather and climatewhen they claim the effects of GHG emissions on global warming are obvious today. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Ocean Service “Weather reflects short-term conditions of the atmosphere while climate is the average daily weather for an extended period of time at a certain location.”  It goes on to explain “Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.”

Hydroclimate Volatility

Patrick Brown described the Swain et al. (2025): Hydroclimate Volatility on a Warming Earth Nature review paper. He quoted the first line of the UCLA Press Release for the paper: “Los Angeles is burning, and accelerating hydroclimate whiplash is the key climate connection”  and remarked: “Thanks in no small part to the huge journalistic audience that lead author Dr. Daniel Swain commands, the “climate whiplash” vernacular was immediately adopted in international headlines covering the recent Los Angeles fires.”  This is a classic example of an extreme weather event that is linked to climate change by organizations and individuals that have a vested interest in advancing the threat of climate change.

Climate Whiplash

I have never heard of the concept of climate whiplash before this story broke.  Brown explains:

Dangerous, intense wildfires require dry vegetation. The idea behind the climate whiplash connection to the Los Angeles fires is that very wet winters in Southern California in 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 enabled a great deal of vegetation growth but that the very dry beginning of the 2024-2025 winter allowed that vegetation to dry out, resulting in a landscape primed for uncontrollable wildfires. Swain explains the mechanism in interviews with Adam Conover and Neil deGrasse Tyson.

In order for this to be a climate change problem, we need to know whether these events are increasing.  Brown noted that:

The idea being conveyed is that these climate whiplash events are dramatically increasing not just in Southern California, but globally.  “Every fraction of a degree of warming speeds the growing destructive power of the transitions” Swain said.

Brown described background for this concept:

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Conclusion

Patrick Brown does an excellent job eviscerating the climate whiplash headlined stories based on Swain et al. (2025)’s recent paper.  It is frustrating that biased analyses that confirm pre-conceived get so much attention.  It will require many evaluations like Brown’s to address the misinformation.

better to know...?

How the Green Energy Narrative confuses things

by R. Schussler, Feb 2, 2025 in WUWT

Prequel to “Unravelling the narrative supporting a green energy transition.”

There is a powerful but misleading narrative supporting a green energy transition. A follow up piece will look more broadly at the general narrative supporting a transition to net zero.  This prequel will provide some detail on a few  components of the energy narrative and how this misleading narrative was established. The green energy narrative works somewhat like a magician’s patter, overemphasizing many things of irrelevance and distracting the audience from the important things going on. Misdirection ensures small truths are misinterpreted and magnified, leading to completely unrealistic hopes and expectations.

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Conclusion

It is becoming increasingly apparent that wind, solar and batteries when pursued at high penetration levels result in high costs, lower reliability and poorer operational outcomes. Expectations from the green energy narrative and real-world results are not consistent and this gulf will continue to widen as long as policy makers continue to reflexively buy into the green energy narrative. This  piece has attempted to illuminate some of the mechanisms that served to produce and sustain the exceedingly  and overly high expectations for a green transition.  The narrative was built upon these and other various deceptions to provide disinformation and hide the  real-world challenges. Such methods continue to be employed with increasing frequency. The follow to this piece up will more systemically examine the components of the green energy narrative and raise many items of critical importance considerations that the green energy narrative ignores.

climate-debate

Scientists don’t know why 2024 was so hot

by D. Whitehouse, Jan 29, 2025 in NetZeroWatch

2024 broke many records.

There’s no doubt that 2024 was the hottest year of the instrumental period. But why it was so warm is not exactly clear, even with the backdrop of increasing global temperatures.

Over the years we have heard a lot about consensus when it comes to climate science. Sometimes it has been manufactured, for example the suggestion that 97% of all scientists believe global warming is real, but in many cases it does represent what is at least a snapshot of what scientists think is happening.

So it was on December 10th at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Washington. A show of hands was requested in answer to the question as to whether we understand why 2023 and 2024 was so hot. Very few hands were raised. Asked a slightly different question, the majority of the audience raised their hands to the proposition that we can’t explain it.

The spike in, already elevated, global temperatures of 2023 and 2024 is beyond what can be explained by more CO2 in the atmosphere. It can’t be explained with El Niño, volcanic emissions or the decline in ship fuel pollution letting more sunlight reach the ocean. Something else is going on.

One team of researchers have suggested it’s due to a decrease in low cloud, which tends to cool our planet. If this is so, then it is important to see if it is a blip or a trend.

Reporting certainty

Such scientific niceties haven’t bothered most reporters dealing with the record-breaking warmth of 2024, which broke the 1.5°C Paris Agreement boundary.

Given that the increase is unexplained, is it wise to present it as evidence of a dangerous new phase in our broken clime, as New Scientist did? Despite the uncertainties, they say that Earth’s climate systems are no longer behaving as they should. It points to the wavering Jet Stream and the recent Californian wildfires as proof, even though it’s technically possible to explain these effects without climate change, catastrophic or not.

New Scientist says the one thing we can now expect ‘with certainty’ is that we ‘should’ expect extreme weather events to become more frequent. What is it? Is it certain, or just something that should happen?

The uncertainty extends into 2025. It was expected that El Niño, which boosted 2023 and 2024 temperatures, would have declined by mid-year, but it didn’t. It has hung on and is expected to linger for most of this year, to be followed by a weak and brief cooling La Niña.

I wonder if there will be another show of hands by puzzled scientists at the end of 2025.