Global Warming More Moderate Than Worst-Case Models A new study based on 1,000 years of temperature records suggests global warming is not progressing as fast as it would under the most severe emissions scenarios outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet, a landbound mass of ice larger than Mexico, experienced substantial surface melt through the austral summer of 2015-2016 during one of the largest El Niño events of the past 50 years, according to scientists who had been conducting the first comprehensive atmospheric measurements in the region since the 1960s.
Hundreds of built and proposed hydroelectric dams may significantly harm life in and around the Amazon by trapping the flow of rich nutrients and modifying the climate from Central America to the Gulf of Mexico. These findings, published in Nature, emerge from a multidisciplinary, international collaboration of researchers from 10 universities, led by scientists at The University of Texas at Austin.
To meet energy needs, economic developers in South America have proposed 428 hydroelectric dams, with 140 currently built or under construction, in the Amazon basin — the largest and most complex network of river channels in the world, which sustains the highest biodiversity on Earth.
“It is absolutely critical to recognize that I am NOT claiming that humans haven’t done great damage to marine and terrestrial [ecosystems], nor that many extinctions have not occurred and more will certainly occur in the near future. But I do think that as scientistswe have a responsibility to be accurate about such comparisons.”
Many popular science articles take this as a given, and indeed, there’s something emotionally satisfying about the idea that humans’ hubris and shortsightedness are so profound that we’re bringing down the whole planet with us.
As the reconstruction of the climate’s development in the past by proxy data shows, there’s a series of temperature cycles that appear to be unknown, or ignored by many climate scientists. Among these are the larger climate cycles of 150 million to 180 million years (see Part 1 and Part 2), but also the shorter and for us the more important following cycles:
1000 years (900-1100) Suess cycle with +/- 0.65°C
230 years (230-250) deVries cycle with +/- 0.30°C
65 years (60-65) Ocean cycles with +/- 0.25°C
This regrettably postpones the much-anticipated Hudson Bay System Study (BaySys) involving 40 scientists from five universities across Canada. Timing was key for this $17 million, four-year, University of Manitoba-led project.
Scientists at Michigan State University (MSU) show that examining the daily minutia of climate, not just temperature, but also sunshine, precipitation and soil moisture simultaneously all over a country gives a better understanding of how variable a land’s climate can be. That information is crucial when countries are setting policies aimed at growing food, protecting water supplies and the environment and stemming disease outbreaks. The findings were reported in this week’s Scientific Reports.
The reduction in global temperature after the recent El Nino continues though not as swiftly as some predicted. The next few months will be interesting to see if it returns to levels seen before the recent El Nino took place when global annual average temperatures changed little for at least 15 years.
The best way to kill off the Climate Debate is to do what Team-Alarm has done for years — stop talking about whether it’s real, and just project forwards, detailing the collapse. For twenty years others have been saying “the debate is over”. Now the tables are turning. The debate really is over, skeptics won, and what’s left is to watch it continue to unravel. Clive James argues that it won’t collapse like a house of cards… (an extract from the new IPA book Climate Change: The Facts 2017.)
In this article, I explore the scientific literature on possible solar indirect effects on climate, and suggest a reasonable way of looking at them. This should also answer Leif Svalgaard’s question, though it seems rather unlikely that he would be unaware of any of the material cited here. Certainly just about everything in this article has already appeared on WUWT; the aim here is to present it in a single article (sorry it’s so long). I provide some links to the works of people like Jasper Kirkby, Nir Shaviv and Nigel Calder. For those who have time, those works are worth reading in their entirety.
The basic physics behind CO2 warming the oceans, and therefore the atmosphere simply don’t exist. The only defined mechanism by which CO2 can affect climate change is by “thermalizing” long-wave infrared radiation between 13 and 18-microns. In reality, there is another one, radiation, but that carries heat away from the earth and results in atmospheric cooling.
In previous posts (here, here and here), we have shown reconstructions for the Antarctic, Southern Hemisphere mid-latitudes, the tropics, the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes, and the Arctic. Here we combine them into a simple global temperature reconstruction. The five regional reconstructions are shown in figure 1. The R code to map the proxy locations, the references and metadata for the proxies, and the global reconstruction spreadsheet can be downloaded here
The conventional basic climate model applies “basic physics” to climate, estimating sensitivity to CO2. However, it has two serious architectural errors. It only allows feedbacks in response to surface warming, so it omits the driver-specific feedbacks
A new NASA study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers.
The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice.
According to the new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008.
As we did in the previous two posts, we will examine each proxy and reject any that have an average time step greater than 130 years or if it does not cover at least part of the Little Ice Age (LIA) and the Holocene Climatic Optimum (HCO). We are looking for coverage from 9000 BP to 500 BP or very close to these values. Only simple statistical techniques that are easy to explain will be used.
by Arthur Viterito, April 25, 2016 in J. of Earth Sc. & Climatic Change
Earth’s climate is a remarkably “noisy” system, driven by scores of oscillators, feedback mechanisms, and radiative forcings. Amidst all this noise, identifying a solitary input to the system (i.e., HGFA MAG4/6 seismic activity as a proxy for geothermal heat flux) that explains 62% of the variation in the earth’s surface temperature is a significant finding. Additionally, the 1997/1998 SIENA was a strong signal for subsequent global warming, and this type of seismic jump may provide valuable predictive information
From the UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX and overheated climate science department, comes a claim that just doesn’t seem plausible, suggesting that in the future, nearly 11% of a “worst-off city” gross domestic product would be consumed by UHI boosted climate change. On the other hand, the study is by Dr. Richard Tol, who is well respected by the climate skeptic community. He does have a point about “the effects of uncontrolled urban heat islands”
Overheated cities face climate change costs at least twice as big as the rest of the world because of the ‘urban heat island’ effect, new research shows.
I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet since late last summer, and here are the results, as of June 6th, 2017. (Quick and easy data source, the daily sunspot image archives from Solarham.)
This data (through March; I’ve updated it since then) was posted on Jerry Pournelle’s blog a while back, and it elicited several questions from readers, who didn’t understand the information contained therein. So here is an effort to elaborate on the data, for those of you who aren’t astronomers/ astrophysicists and don’t want to have to keep up with all this stuff.
In April 2016, southeast Asia experienced surface air temperatures (SATs) that surpassed national records, exacerbated energy consumption, disrupted agriculture and caused severe human discomfort. Here we show using observations and an ensemble of global warming simulations the combined impact of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon and long-term warming on regional SAT extremes. We find a robust relationship between ENSO and southeast Asian SATs wherein virtually all April extremes occur during El Niño years.
In the last post (see here) we introduced a new Holocene temperature reconstruction for Antarctica using some of the Marcott, et al. (2013) proxies. In this post, we will present two more reconstructions, one for the Southern Hemisphere mid-latitudes (60°S to 30°S) and another for the tropics (30°S to 30°N)
Solar cycle 24 has seen very low solar activity thus far, likely the lowest in 100 years. The F10.7 flux shows that over the last three and a half years the Sun has gone from solar maximum through a bounded decline to the current stage of the trail to minimum. Solar minimum is likely to be still three years away.
La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse