Other countries are failing to meet their targets, but we’re not only achieving them, we’re overdoing it. And this is despite our obvious handicaps: like that we have rapid population growth, are further from everywhere and anywhere* except for Antarctica, and we’re the largest coal exporter in the world;
The indefatigable Roy Spencer at the University of Alabama at Huntsville is the first to declare the global temperature anomaly for December 2017. As Fig. 1 shows, in the 39 years 1 month from December 1978 to December 2017, the planet has warmed by half a Celsius degree. But that is equivalent to 1.28 C°/century, or little more than one-third of the 3.3 C°/century predicted with “substantial confidence” by IPCC in 1990 and also by the fifth-generation general-circulation models of the Climate Model Intercomparison Project in 2013.
Determining magnitudes of sea surface temperature variability is important for attributing past and predicting future changes in climate, and generally requires the use of proxies to constrain multidecadal and longer timescales of variability. We report a multiproxy estimate of sea surface temperature variability that is consistent between proxy types and with instrumental estimates but strongly diverges from climate model simulations toward longer timescales. At millennial timescales, model−data discrepancies reach two orders of magnitude in the tropics, indicating substantial problems with models or proxies, or both, and highlighting a need to better determine the variability of sea surface temperatures.
In the last 12 months, 150 graphs from 122 peer-reviewed scientific papers have been published that undermine the popularized conception of a slowly cooling Earth temperature history followed by a dramatic hockey-stick-shaped uptick, or an especially unusual global-scale warming during modern times.
Yes, some regions of the Earth have been warming in recent decades or at some point in the last 100 years.
Some regions have been cooling for decades at a time.
And many regions have shown no significant net changes or trends in either direction relative to the last few hundred to thousands of years.
Succinctly, then, scientists publishing in peer-reviewed journals have increasingly affirmed that there is nothing historically unprecedented or remarkable about today’s climate when viewed in the context of long-term natural variability.
The following (partial) list has been organized by geographical region
The East Antarctic Ice Sheet locks away enough water to raise sea level an estimated 53 meters (174 feet), more than any other ice sheet on the planet. It’s also thought to be among the most stable, not gaining or losing mass even as ice sheets in West Antarctica and Greenland shrink.
Meteorologist Joe Bastardi warned of a cold snap gripping the Eastern US many weeks ago, in October, at his Weatherbell Analytics site, which I visit almost daily.
Today it’s all over the news: The Great Freeze of 2017 is smashing through the entire North American East, bringing with it a wave of record temperatures.
I got to thinking about the records of the sea level height taken at tidal stations all over the planet. The main problem with these tide stations is that they measure the height of the sea surface versus the height of some object attached to the land … but the land isn’t sitting still. In most places around the planet the land surface is actually rising or falling, and in some places, it’s doing so at a surprising rate, millimeters per year.
Tales of doom and gloom about polar bears reflect what some people think might happen in the future, not what is happening right now. Currently, polar bears are doing just fine despite the low summer sea ice coverage they’ve experienced since 2007 (Crockford 2017a; York et al. 2016). In other words, there has been no global population decline as predicted: officially, the numbers were 22,000-31,000 (or 26,500 average) in 2015 (Wiig et al. 2015) but about 28,500 when estimates published since then are included (Aars et al. 2017; Dyck et al. 2017; Matishov et al. 2014; SWG 2016), up from about 22,500 in 2005).
by David Kirtley, December 28, 2017, in SkepticalScicence
In Part 1, we learned about carbon isotopes: how 14C forms in the atmosphere, how different isotopes move through the Carbon Cycle, and how isotopic measurements reveal clues about our changing climate. In this post we will look at how measurements of changing isotopic ratios are described.
by K. Richard, December 28, 2017 in ClimateChangeDispatch
During 2017, 120 papers linking historical and modern climate change to variations in solar activity and its modulators (clouds, cosmic rays) have been published in scientific journals.
It has been increasingly established that low solar activity (fewer sunspots) and increased cloud cover (as modulated by cosmic rays) are highly associated with a cooling climate.
In recent years, the Earth has unfortunately left a period of very high solar activity, the Modern Grand Maximum. Periods of high solar activity correspond to multi-decadal- to centennial-scale warming.
Solar scientists are now increasingly forecasting a period of very low activity that will commence in the next few years (by around 2020 to 2025). This will lead to climate cooling, even Little Ice Age conditions.
Thirteen recently-published papers forecasting global cooling are listed below.
This is the seventh and last post in my series on the hazards of climate change. In this post we examine the effects of climate change on glaciers and sea level rise. The first six examined the effect of humans on the environment, the effect of the growing human population, climate change and the food supply, the cost of global warming, the effect of man and climate change on extinctions, climate (or weather) related deaths, and extreme weather and climate change.
Does record breaking winter cold cast doubt on climate predictions of milder winters? Could ANY weather or climate shift cast doubt on the dominance of that wicked little trace molecule? Apparently not, according to leading climate explainers.
Greens who celebrated China’s switch to gas are now worried the plans seem to be in disarray, as rushed conversions trigger a gas supply crisis. But behind the scenes, China is pursuing a gas production plan so carbon intensive, even Chinese greens are openly criticising central government policy.
The data for November 2017 HadCRUT4 (click on image to enlarge) has just been released by the UK Met Office. It is 0.547, better expressed as 14.55 +/- 0.10 °C. Given the substantial monthly variability evident in this database one has to be careful in drawing many conclusions about it. Given that, it is interesting to note that November 2017 is statistically the same as most Novembers of the so-called pause years, i.e. 1997, 2001, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2010, 2012, 2014 and even 2016.
Last week, Anthony highlighted a study by Svensmark, Shaviv et al. in a post entitled New paper: The missing link between cosmic rays, clouds, and climate change on Earth. While some were enthusiastic about their claims, Leif Svalgaard and I were much more restrained in our opinions (…)
by P Gosselin, December 26, 2017 in Lining and Vahrenholt, No TricksZone
What follows are 6 recent studies presented by Lüning and Vahrenholt, which dump cold water on the claim storms will get more frequent and intense.
The studies fly in the face of a recent Nature editorial piece, one filled with the usual worn out alarmist propaganda language of climate doom we’ve been seeing for over a quarter century. The editorial claims some scientists have already found the link between “weird weather” and greenhouse gases.
We know that prediction is difficult, especially about the future as the saying goes, but as an entertainment in the festive season we are asking for your 2018 global temperature forecast.
Every year at this time the UK Met Office issues its forecast of the global annual temperature for the following year. This time it says that 2018 will be another very warm year globally, but it is unlikely to be a new record due to the cooling effect of about 0.1 °C from a moderate La Niña in the Pacific.
by RomanM, December 28, 2017 in McIntyre ClimAudit
The “lipstick” on the paper’s Figure 2 is perhaps one of the best examples of creating a misleading aura of “real science” that I have encountered in some time (…)
by Fred Pearce, December 19, 2017 in Yale Environment360
In September, some 200 scientists wrote to the EU insisting that “bioenergy [from forest biomass] is not carbon-neutral” and calling for tighter rules to protect forests and their carbon. Yet just a month later, EU ministers rubber-stamped the existing carbon accounting rules, reaffirming that the burning of wood pellets is renewable energy.
At the German Die kalte Sonne site here, Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt present another two recent papers showing that models are failing to simulate the climate and cannot be used to make prognoses.
Reflecting upon my previous post, Where The Temperature Rules The Sun, I realized that while it was valid, it was just about temperature controlling downwelling solar energy via cloud variations. However, it didn’t cover total energy input to the surface. The total energy absorbed by the surface is the sum of the net solar energy (surface downwelling solar minus surface reflections) plus the downwelling longwave infrared, or DWIR. This is the total energy that is absorbed by and actually heats the surface.
For the first time scientists have directly observed living bacteria in polar ice and snow — an environment once considered sterile. “As microbial activity and its influence on its local environment has never been taken into account when looking at ice-core gas samples it could provide a moderate source of error in climate history interpretations.”
There have been so many very good essays on Global Sea Level Rise by persons all of whom have a great deal more expertise than I. Jo Nova hosts a dozen or so excellent essays, which point at another score of papers and publications, for the most part clearly demonstrating that there are two contrarian positions on sea level rise in the scientific community: 1) Sea level has risen, is rising and will continue to rise at a rate approximately 8-12 inches (20-30 centimeters) per century — due to geological and long-term climatic forces well beyond our control; and 2a) Other than explicit cases of Local Relative SLR, the sea does not appear to be rising much over the last 50-70 years, if at all. 2b) If it is rising due to general warming of the climate it will not add much to position 1.
La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse
