Archives de catégorie : climate-debate

better to know...?, climate-debate

Emails reveal how children become pawns of climate alarmism

by Anthony Watts, March 13, 2019 in WUWT

Genesis of a Shakedown: New Records Expose Children’s Marches as Long-Planned Component of Litigation Campaign

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These public records produced mere days after 60 Minutes’s promotional segment, and days before the nationwide children’s climate walkouts, affirm:

  • the climate litigation campaign was expressly grounded in this failure of “conventional approaches” otherwise known as our constitutional system

  • it was to be “linked to youth climate movement (world-wide marches)”;

  • it would be accompanied by a press strategy including documentaries featuring children;

  • the meeting was acknowledged, but this strategy laid out there was “not to be publicized”;

  • the strategy sought both a cooperative federal administration “Consent decrees (would be ideal)” — and to “Bring selected carbon majors to the table, then what?”

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climate-debate

CA sea level rise alarmist study ignores 30 years of NOAA data with no coastal sea level rise acceleration

by Larry Hamlin, March 13, 2019 in WUWT

NOAA tide gauge data measurements exist for 17 locations along the California coast with 8 of these locations having actual measured sea level rise data covering periods for more than 70 to 120 years in duration.

This measured data shows that none of these California locations are experiencing coastal sea level rise acceleration since climate alarmist first made such erroneous and flawed sea level acceleration claims before the U.S. Senate in 1988.

Climate alarmists and their supporting media conveniently conceal the fact that their flawed claims have been hyped for the last 30 years as they continue to try again and again to make the same repeated but flawed claims apparently hoping that the public will forget their long track record of failure and exaggeration.

NOAA measured tide gauge data shows that coastal sea level rise at Ca. locations varies between 3 to 12 inches per century and have remained at those levels during the long measurement periods during which actual measured data have been recorded with a sample of that measured data shown below for San Diego, La Jolla, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Polar bear habitat update: abundant sea ice across the Arctic, even in the Barents Sea

by Polar Bear Science, March 12, 2019

Abundant ice in Svalbard, East Greenland and the Labrador Sea is excellent news for the spring feeding season ahead because this is when bears truly need the presence of ice for hunting and mating. As far as I can tell, sea ice has not reached Bear Island, Norway at this time of year since 2010 but this year ice moved down to the island on 3 March and has been there ever since. This may mean we’ll be getting reports of polar bear sightings from the meteorological station there, so stay tuned.


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climate-debate

The Role of Sulfur Dioxide Aerosols in Climate Change

by Buel Henry, May 26, 2015 in WUWT

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Anthropogenic emissions of SO2 into the troposphere peaked during year 1972 at about 131 Megatonnes. By year 2000, due to worldwide Clean Air Act efforts, SO2 emissions in the West had decreased by approximately 48 Megatonnes. However, during the same time period, emissions elsewhere rose by 23 Megatonnes, for a net worldwide decrease of 25 Megatonnes.

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Figure 1: Global sulfur dioxide emissions by region (North Amer- ica = USA,Canada; East Asia, Japan, China, and South Korea). J.Smith et al., Fig 6.

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It also proves that the IPCC “Graph of Radiative Forcings” is completely incorrect, since it does not include any warming due to the removal of dimming-aerosols from the atmosphere. To be correct, this forcing needs to be included (which will have the effect of completely eliminating any forcing due to CO2). As noted above, all of the warming can be accounted for by the reduction in SO2 emissions.

climate-debate

New Paper: Widespread Collapse Of Ice Sheets ~5000 Years Ago Added 3-4 Meters To Rising Seas

by K. Richard, March 11, 2019 in NoTricksZone

During the Mid-Holocene, when CO2 concentrations were stable and low (270 ppm), Antarctica’s massive Ross Ice Shelf naturally collapsed, adding the meltwater equivalent of 3-4 meters to sea levels.

Because CO2 concentrations changed very modestly during the pre-industrial Holocene (approximately ~25 ppm in 10,000 years), climate models that are predicated on the assumption that CO2 concentration changes drive ocean temperatures, ice sheet melt, and sea level rise necessarily simulate a very stable Holocene climate.

In contrast, changes in ocean temperatures, ice sheet melt, and sea level rise rates were far more abrupt and variable during the Holocene than during the last 100 years.

Modern ocean changes are barely detectable in the context of natural variability

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Image Source(s): Rosenthal et al., 2013; Climate Audit

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climate-debate

Henrik Svensmark: Force Majeure – The Sun’s Role In Climate Change (PDF)

in GWPF, March 11, 2019

London, 11 March: A new report from the Global Warming Policy Foundation reveals that the solar influence on climate is is much larger than is generally recognised.

The report, by Professor Henrik Svensmark of the Danish National Space Institute, outlines some of the remarkable correlations between solar activity and past climate changes. It also shows that the output of the Sun alone – the so-called total solar irradiance – cannot explain them.

“Changes in total solar irradiance are actually quite small”, says Professor Svensmark. “They would have to be nearly 10 times larger to explain how the oceans warm and cool over the 11-year solar cycle.”

New research suggests that other mechanisms can amplify the effect of solar activity. The New report reviews the possible candidates, concluding that the most likely of these is the effects of galactic cosmic rays on cloud formation. This idea is plausible in theory and has received substantial empirical support in recent years.

However, Professor Svensmark says that insufficient attention is being paid to this research area:

“Galactic cosmic rays seem to be very important drivers of the Earth’s climate. But they are mostly being ignored at the moment because they are seen as distracting from conventional global warming research. Science needs to do better if we want to make progress in understanding the actual impact of natural factors of climate change.”

Henrik Svensmark: Force Majeure – The Sun’s Role In Climate Change (PDF)

About the author
Prof Henrik Svensmark is a physicist and a senior researcher in the Astrophysics and Atmospheric Physics Division of the National Space Institute (DTU Space) in Lyngby, Denmark. Svensmark presently leads the Sun–Climate Research group at DTU Space.
climate-debate

CHINA AND THE PAUSE

by GWPF, March 8, 2019

Chinese climate scientists are clearly off-message. They keep referring to the global warming hiatus which so many scientists and activists – those who shout on twitter and prowl the comment sections of off-colour articles on the subject – know has been trounced and discredited again and again. They clearly ought to have a word with the emerging science powerhouse that is China.

Writing recently in “Science of The Total Environment,” Li and Zha of Nanjing Normal University, say the global hiatus has played a prominent role in their thinking and they see it reflected in China. Using satellite data they found a hiatus in China between 2001-15. They found warming in western and southern China and a 15-year cooling trend in northern China. For China as a whole they estimate that the warming rate is just -0.02°C per decade. The conclude that, “there is a regional warming hiatus, a pause or slowdown in China, and (it) implies that greenhouse gas induced warming is suppressed by other natural forcing in the early 21st century.”

There is also Li et al writing in Climate Dynamics who are a little more forceful saying, “since the late 1990s, the global warming has ground to a halt, which has sparked a rising interest among the climate scientists. The hiatus is not only observed in globally average surface air temperature, but also in the China winter air temperature trend, which turns from warming during 1979-1997 to cooling during 1998-2013.” They attribute the effect to the melting of Arctic sea ice.

Gan et al (Lanzhou University and South Dakota State University), reporting in Earth and Space Science say that the hiatus, if not cooling, is seen over the Northern Hemisphere finding that the daily temperature minimum experienced an “obvious” decline in North America during the warming slowdown period. They relate the changes in daily temperature minimum to the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation.

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Biodiversity, biology+acidification, climate-debate

Global Warming off the hook? Alien species are primary cause of recent global extinctions

by University College London, March 3, 2019 in WUWT

Alien species are the main driver of recent extinctions in both animals and plants, according to a new study by UCL researchers.

They found that since 1500, alien species have been solely responsible for 126 extinctions, 13% of the total number studied.

Of 953 global extinctions, 300 happened in some part because of alien species, and of those 300, 42% had alien species alone listed as the cause of their demise.

The study, published today in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, used data from the 2017 IUCN Red List on the total numbers of species that are considered to have gone extinct globally since 1500.

In total, 261 out of 782 animal species (33.4%) and 39 out of 153 plant species (25.5%) listed aliens as one of their extinction drivers. In contrast, native species impacts were associated with only 2.7% of animal extinctions and 4.6% of plant extinctions.

 

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climate-debate

2019 GLOBAL TEMPS PREDICTION: THE ENTRIES ARE IN

by GWPF, March 6, 2019

The Met Office says it’s going to get warmer this year. GWPF readers reckon not.

Back in early February, we invited readers to submit their entries for our 2019 global temperature prediction competition. The GWPF posse had soundly beaten the Met Office in last year’s competition, and you certainly seemed encouraged by your success, as there were 250 entries this time round, more than double last year’s entry.

For 2019, the Met Office have once again pushed the boat out on their predictions, suggesting that we might see a temperature rise of 0.19°C by the year end.

As you can see from the graph below, GWPF readers are a lot more cautious. The graph is a histogram of the entries, so the height of each blue bar is the number of readers making a particular prediction, the temperatures being given in terms of anomalies from the 1961-1990 average. The most common prediction was therefore for a slight decline in temperature over the course of the year, down to to 0.55°C from last year’s 0.6°C. The Met Office prediction is the grey band – they have given a single value this time round, rather than the range given in previous years.

better to know...?, climate-debate

A Month Without Sunspots

by Dr Tony Phillips, March 6, 2019 in SpaceWeatherArchive

March 1, 2019: There are 28 days in February. This year, all 28 of them were spotless. The sun had no sunspots for the entire month of Feb. 2019. This is how the solar disk looked every day:

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How does this affect us on Earth? The biggest change may be cosmic rays. High energy particles from deep space penetrate the inner solar system with greater ease during periods of low solar activity. Indeed, NASA spacecraft and space weather balloons are detecting just such an increase in radiation. Cosmic rays can alter the flow of electricity through Earth’s atmosphere, trigger lightning, potentially alter cloud cover, and dose commercial air travelers with extra “rads on a plane.”

As February ended, March is beginning … with no sunspots. Welcome to Solar Minimum!

better to know...?, climate-debate

CLIMATE SCIENTIST NIC LEWIS: ‘EUROPEAN CO2 EMISSIONS DON’T MATTER’

by Edwin Timmer, March 9, 2019 in GWPF

“What really matters is: what happens in developing countries such as China, India, Indonesia, Brazil and Nigeria”, says Lewis, who gave a presentation at De Groene Rekenkamer Foundation this week in Amsterdam. According to him, it is much more important that developing countries quickly become richer and how rising CO2 emissions that this entails can be limited.

“We have a lot of knowledge and expertise in Europe. We can spend our money better than investing billions in subsidies and other climate policies that have virtually no effect on global emissions.”

Lewis would prefer to see investments in the development of clean nuclear energy or techniques to get CO2 out of the air and shut down coal-fired plants. “That could then be rolled out over the rest of the world.”

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climate-debate

Global-scale multidecadal variability missing in state-of-the-art climate models

by S. Kravstov et al. 2018, in Nature

Reliability of future global warming projections depends on how well climate models reproduce the observed climate change over the twentieth century. In this regard, deviations of the model-simulated climate change from observations, such as a recent “pause” in global warming, have received considerable attention. Such decadal mismatches between model-simulated and observed climate trends are common throughout the twentieth century, and their causes are still poorly understood. Here we show that the discrepancies between the observed and simulated climate variability on decadal and longer timescale have a coherent structure suggestive of a pronounced Global Multidecadal Oscillation. Surface temperature anomalies associated with this variability originate in the North Atlantic and spread out to the Pacific and Southern oceans and Antarctica, with Arctic following suit in about 25–35 years. While climate models exhibit various levels of decadal climate variability and some regional similarities to observations, none of the model simulations considered match the observed signal in terms of its magnitude, spatial patterns and their sequential time development. These results highlight a substantial degree of uncertainty in our interpretation of the observed climate change using current generation of climate models.

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climate-debate

Our Planet Is Beautiful But Far From Fragile

by W.E. William, March 7, 2019 in ClimateChangeDispatch

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claims that “the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.”

The people at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agree, saying that to avoid some of the most devastating impacts of climate change, the world must slash carbon emissions by 45 percent by 2030 and completely decarbonize by 2050.

Such dire warnings are not new. In 1970, Harvard University biology professor George Wald, a Nobel laureate, predicted, “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

Also in 1970, Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist, predicted in an article for The Progressive, “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”

The year before, he had warned, “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

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climate-debate, press and newspapers

Climate Science’s Myth-Buster

by Guy Sorman, March 2019 in CityJournal

We’ve all come across the images of polar bears drifting on ice floes: emblematic victims of the global warming that’s melting the polar ice caps, symbols of the threat to the earth posed by our ceaseless energy production—above all, the carbon dioxide that factories and automobiles emit. We hear louder and louder demands to impose limits, to change our wasteful ways, so as to save not only the bears but also the planet and ourselves.

In political discourse and in the media, major storms and floods typically get presented as signs of impending doom, accompanied by invocations to the environment and calls to respect Mother Nature. Only catastrophes seem to grab our attention, though, and it’s rarely mentioned that warming would also bring some benefits, such as expanded production of grains in previously frozen regions of Canada and Russia. Nor do we hear that people die more often of cold weather than of hot weather. Isolated voices criticize the alarm over global warming, considering it a pseudoscientific thesis, the true aim of which is to thwart economic modernization and free-market growth and to extend the power of states over individual choices.

Not being a climatologist myself, I’ve always had trouble deciding between these arguments. And then I met Judith Curry at her home in Reno, Nevada. Curry is a true climatologist …

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climate-debate, press and newspapers

Une Belgique trop ambitieuse sur le climat

by Prof. Samuel Furfari, 6 mars 2019 in L’Echo

En Belgique francophone, l’intérêt pour la question climatique ne cesse de croître. A la faveur du succès remporté par les écolos aux élections communales d’octobre dernier, les partis francophones se sont lancés dans une surenchère de promesses. A cela viennent se greffer les marches pro-environnement enthousiastes mais néanmoins naïves de lycéens qui, en matière d’énergie et de climat, connaissent très peu de choses. Avec un peu plus de connaissances, ils demanderaient des fenêtres hermétiques et à double vitrage dans leurs classes, au lieu de panneaux photovoltaïques, on y reviendra. En quelques jours on est passé d’un gouvernement critiqué pour être timide à une proposition de loi climat qui n’a pas d’équivalent dans le reste du monde. Car ne nous y trompons pas, la frénésie climatique est belge. Même si on ne devrait pas être étonné que Trump n’ait pas prononcé le mot climat dans son récent discours de l’Union, ce que j’observe professionnellement dans le monde ne correspond en rien à ce que vit la Belgique. Il y a lieu de s’interroger sur les motifs réels de ce déferlement ; ce n’est pas audible pour l’instant mais on devra y répondre un jour.

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climate-debate

The ‘trick’: How More Cooling Generates Global Warming

by Jennifer Marohasy, March 5, 2019 in WUWT

The Bureau of Meteorology has rewritten Australia’s temperature in this way for the second time in just six years – increasing the rate of warming by 23 percent between Version 1 and the new Version 2 of the official ACORN-SAT temperature record.

Temperatures from the Rutherglen research station in rural Victoria are one of the 112 weather stations that make-up ACORN-SAT. Temperature have been changed here by Blair Trewin, under the supervision of David Jones at the Bureau.

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Annual average minimum temperatures at Rutherglen (1913 to 2017). Raw temperatures (green) show a mild cooling trend of 0.28 degrees Celsius per 100 years. This cooling trend has been changed to warming of 1.7 degrees Celsius per 100 years in ACORN-SAT Version 1 (orange). These temperatures have been further remodeled in ACORN-SAT Version 1 (red) to give even more dramatic warming, which is now 1.9 degrees Celsius.

climate-debate

Arctic Sea Ice Extent Same As In 2005

by P. Homewood, March 5, 2019 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

You may wonder why you have not heard much about Arctic sea ice death spirals and Greenland heatwaves this winter.

Hardly surprising, because the Arctic stubbornly refuses to follow the agenda.

Average sea ice extent last month was the highest since 2013, and stands as high as it did in 2005.

http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover_30y.uk.php

climate-debate

New Santer Study: 97% Consensus is now 99.99997%

by Dr. Roy Spencer, February 27, 2019 in GlobalWarming

A new paper in Nature Climate Change by Santer et al. (paywalled) claims that the 40 year record of global tropospheric temperatures agrees with climate model simulations of anthropogenic global warming so well that there is less than a 1 in 3.5 million chance (5 sigma, one-tailed test) that the agreement between models and satellites is just by chance.

And, yes, that applies to our (UAH) dataset as well.

While it’s nice that the authors commemorate 40 years of satellite temperature monitoring method (which John Christy and I originally developed), I’m dismayed that this published result could feed a new “one in a million” meme that rivals the “97% of scientists agree” meme, which has been a very successful talking point for politicians, journalists, and liberal arts majors.

John Christy and I examined the study to see just what was done. I will give you the bottom line first, in case you don’t have time to wade through the details:

The new Santer et al. study merely shows that the satellite data have indeed detected warming (not saying how much) that the models can currently only explain with increasing CO2 (since they cannot yet reproduce natural climate variability on multi-decadal time scales).

That’s all.

But we already knew that, didn’t we? So why publish a paper that goes to such great lengths to demonstrate it with an absurdly exaggerated statistic such as 1 in 3.5 million (which corresponds to 99.99997% confidence)? I’ll leave that as a rhetorical question for you to ponder.

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climate-debate

Warming Predictions Defied: Japan Winters Cool, Great Lakes Ice Grows And Cal Snow Pack Hits Record

by P. Gosselin, March 2, 2019 in NoTricksZone

Japan winters are cooling

The Pacific island nation of Japan refuses to obey climate scientists’ forecasts of warming and ignore climate alarmists and their chorus of doomsday shrieks. Climate trends are moving the other way.

Now that February has ended, the 2018/19 winter is now in the books. We’ve tabulated the winter temperature data for Japan going back 32 years. The following chart tells a story that was not supposed to happen:

Japan’s mean winter temperature has been falling for more than 30 years, according to the data from the Japan Meteorology Agency (JMA).

While alarmists insist it’s heating up everywhere, the reality is actually just the opposite, and not just in Japan.

Finland is cooling

The Scandinavian country of Finland, which extends up into the Arctic, also shows no signs of warming at all since December, 1988.

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climate-debate

Critique of the new Santer et al. (2019) paper

by Ross McKitrick, March1, 2019 in WUWT

Ben Santer et al. have a new paper out in Nature Climate Change arguing that with 40 years of satellite data available they can detect the anthropogenic influence in the mid-troposphere at a 5-sigma level of confidence. This, they point out, is the “gold standard” of proof in particle physics, even invoking for comparison the Higgs boson discovery in their Supplementary information.

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Conclusion

The fact that in my example the t-statistic on anthro falls to a low level does not “prove” that anthropogenic forcing has no effect on tropospheric temperatures. It does show that in the framework of my model the effects are not statistically significant. If you think the model is correctly-specified and the data set is appropriate you will have reason to accept the result, at least provisionally. If you have reason to doubt the correctness of the specification then you are not obliged to accept the result.

This is the nature of evidence from statistical modeling: it is contingent on the specification and assumptions. In my view the second regression is a more valid specification than the first one, so faced with a choice between the two, the second set of results is more valid. But there may be other, more valid specifications that yield different results.

In the same way, since I have reason to doubt the validity of the Santer et al. model I don’t accept their conclusions. They haven’t shown what they say they showed. In particular they have not identified a unique anthropogenic fingerprint, or provided a credible control for natural variability over the sample period. Nor have they justified the use of Gaussian p-values. Their claim to have attained a “gold standard” of proof are unwarranted, in part because statistical modeling can never do that, and in part because of the specific problems in their model.

climate-debate

BBC Repeat Fake Extreme Weather Disaster Claims

by P. Homewood, February 9, 2019 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

Politicians and policymakers have failed to grasp the gravity of the environmental crisis facing the Earth, a report claims.

The think-tank IPPR says human impacts have reached a critical stage and threaten to destabilise society and the global economy.

Scientists warn of a potentially deadly combination of factors.

These include climate change, mass loss of species, topsoil erosion, forest felling and acidifying oceans.

The report from the centre-left Institute for Public Policy Research says these factors are “driving a complex, dynamic process of environmental destabilisation that has reached critical levels.

“This destabilisation is occurring at speeds unprecedented in human history and, in some cases, over billions of years.”

The IPPR warns that the window of opportunity to avoid catastrophic outcomes is rapidly closing.

The authors urge three shifts in political understanding: on the scale and pace of environmental breakdown; the implications for societies; and the subsequent need for transformative change.

​They say since 2005, the number of floods across the world has increased by 15 times, extreme temperature events by 20 times, and wildfires seven-fold.

At least climate change features in policy discussions, they say – but other vitally important impacts barely figure.

What issues are being under-played?

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climate-debate

New February Temperature Record At Kew–But Is It Evidence Of Climate Change?

by P. Homewood, February 27, 2019 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

 

But let’s take a closer look.

Daily temperature extremes are not especially meaningful in themselves.

If global warming is responsible for yesterday’s record , was it also responsible for the record January temperature set in 1958? Or in March 1968, April 1949, May 1922, June 1957, September 1906 or December 1948, when records, which still stand, were also set?

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climate-debate

STATE OF THE POLAR BEAR REPORT 2018

by Susan Crockford, February 2019, in GWPF

Inuit paying the price of rising bear populations

The 2018 State of the Polar Bear report, published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, confirms that polar bears are continuing to thrive, despite recent reductions in sea ice levels. This finding contradicts claims by environmentalists and some scientists that falls in sea ice would wipe out bear populations.

The report’s author, zoologist Dr Susan Crockford, says that there is now very little evidence to support the idea that the polar bear is threatened with extinction by climate change.

Foreword

From 1972 until 2010,1 the Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) published comprehensive status reports every four years or so, as proceedings of their official meetings, making them available in electronic format. Until 2018 – a full eight years after its last report – the PBSG had disseminated information only on its website, updated (without announcement) at its discretion. In April 2018, the PBSG finally produced a standalone proceedings document from its 2016 meeting, although most people would have been unaware that this document existed unless they visited the PBSG website.

This State of the Polar Bear Report is intended to provide a yearly update of the kind of content available in those occasional PBSG meeting reports, albeit with more critical com- mentary regarding some of the inconsistencies and sources of bias present in the corpus of reports and papers. It is a summary of the state of polar bears in the Arctic since 2014, rela- tive to historical records, based on a review of the recent and historical scientific literature. It is intended for a wide audience, including scientists, teachers, students, decision-makers and the general public interested in polar bears and Arctic ecology.

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climate and geology, climate-debate

Geological ‘Hotspot’ Melting Pine Island And Thwaites Glaciers, Not Global Warming

by J.E. Kamis, February 25, 2019 in ClimateChangeDispatch

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SUMMARY

Research study after research study has now proven beyond any doubt that the 350,000-square-mile subglacial Marie Byrd Mantle Plume and its associated geological features that are emitting massive amounts of ice melting heat and heated fluid onto the base of the Pine Island Glacier and Thwaites Glaciers.

Failure of the media to include in their numerous articles this telling scientific evidence which substantiates the significant and likely dominant role of this subglacial geologically induced heat flow in melting of West Antarctic glaciers is difficult to reconcile with proper scientific methodology.

A methodology which states that new and relevant data should be used to review old supposedly 100% settled theories.

Most of these research studies have been released one by one during the last three years which has led to minimizing their collective importance.  Numerous previous Climate Change Dispatch articles written by this author beginning in 2014 have inexplicably been ignored by mainstream media outlets.

It’s time for the media to inform the public that by tying all this information together that a clear picture emerges concerning the significant impact of Antarctic subglacial geologically induced heat flow.