by E. Garnier, septembre 2012, in Risques, les Cahiers de l’Assurance
Ce travail tente de prouver l’intérêt pour l’assureur d’une approche historique consacrée aux tempêtes et aux cyclones entre 1500 et nos jours. Les exemples de la France, de l’Europe et de l’océan Indien montrent que ces événements extrêmes sont en réalité des facteurs de permanence historique et que les archives peuvent être très utiles pour estimer leur sévérité. Dans cette perspective, une simulation du coût actuel de la tempête atlantique de mars 1937 est réalisée. Elle révèle que les sociétés littorales de cette époque étaient nettement plus résilientes. Enfin, l’étude prouve que, depuis la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, la vulnérabilité a augmenté plus rapidement que l’aléa tempête, notamment depuis les années 1990 avec l’urbanisation croissante des littoraux.
(…) I like the TAO buoy data because we can be sure that it is free of urban heat islands, changes in location, instrumentation changes, and many of the other problems that plague land-based stations. It is also measured very frequently, typically every ten minutes. This lets us explore the daily cycles of air and sea temperature, solar radiation, longwave radiation, humidity, and the like.
It has long been dawning on most people that the costs of Germany’s Energiewende (transition to green energies) have been spectacularly underestimated. As Germany rushes into its foray with renewable energies, principally wind and sun, we are finding out that many of the costs involved were never taken into account.
The short answer to the question posed in the title to this article is virtually and practically nothing. They definitely do not tell us what is claimed, that is, accurate representation of the state of the atmosphere including temperature in individual years. This is why one of the world’s experts on atmospheric chemistry and ice cores Zbigniew Jaworowski M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc., wrote,
“It was never experimentally demonstrated that ice core records reliably represent the original atmospheric composition.”
According to Webster’s, science is: “knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws.”
The way I see it, science is a method of discovering truths. For the idea to make any sense at all, though, we need first to agree that scientific truth is objective. Now, a particular truth or fact may of course be unknown, or poorly understood, or wrongly apprehended, at a particular time. But in science, one man’s truth must be the same as another’s. (…)
Germany’s utopian dream of transforming itself into the world’s green powerhouse is collapsing as its political and media establishment is mugged by reality. The country’s climate obsession has turned into one of the country’s biggest political and economic handicaps, making Germany almost ungovernable.
La fermeture des centrales nucléaires belges pourrait entraîner une augmentation de 50% des émissions de CO2 liées à la production d’énergie d’ici 2030, selon le professeur d’économie Johan Albrecht (UGent – Université de Gand), qui est également membre de l’institut de réflexion Itinera. Cela alors que le gouvernement fédéral et les entités fédérées doivent négocier dans les semaines à venir le Pacte énergétique, qui doit fixer l’avenir de la production d’électricité en Belgique.
Dans un essai édifiant, le journaliste Guillaume Pitron dévoile “la face cachée de la transition énergétique et numérique”. Selon lui, le recours aux éoliennes, panneaux solaires et autres véhicules électriques n’a fait que déplacer l’impact de l’activité humaine sur les écosystèmes.
by Paul Homewood, January 8, 2018 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
The England & Wales Precipitation Series has now been updated for last year.
Precipitation totalled 952mm during the year, slightly above the series average of 918mm. In ascending order, 2017 ranked 158th.
There seems to be little evidence of any real trends. Whatever trend can be winkled out of the numbers will likely be too small to notice, and swamped by the natural variability in the data.
The wettest years remain 1872 and 1768. The driest were 1788 and 1921.
At the excellent Curious Wavefunction blog of Ash Jogalekar, there’s an article (posted last year) about Freeman Dyson, who is 94 today.
He disapproves of faith in computer models and of the zealous dogmatism exhibited by some climate change activists, and both these points are extremely well taken. Ultimately Dyson is saying something simple; that science progresses only when there is a critical mass of skeptics challenging the status quo
More than 220 million Americans are preparing for the coldest New Year in living memory as the cold snap that has swept across the northern states prompts chaos across the country.
Temperatures atop the highest peak in the north-east, Mount Washington, hit a shocking -37 degrees celsius – breaking the previous record at the Mount Washington Observatory in New Hampshire of -35C which was set in 1933.
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).
Elsevier has retracted 13 papers—and says it will retract 13 more—after discovering they were accepted because of fake reviews.
A spokesperson for Elsevier told us that the journals are in the process of retracting all 26 papers affected by the “peer-review manipulation” and “unexplained authorship irregularities.” Most share one corresponding author, a physical science researcher based in Iran.
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.
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 Joshua Nevett, December 23, 2017 in DailyStar, UK
A GLOBAL cool down lasting 120 years will trigger “more intense” winters that threaten months of freezing temperatures and snow “within a few years”, climate scientists have warned.
Hopefully, the first two posts in this series, “Do humans harm the environment” and “Population Growth and the Food Supply” have convinced the reader that man-made climate change and global warming are not an existential threat to humanity or the planet. This leaves us in a discussion of the cost of global warming, which is something we can calculate. To do the calculation, we need to estimate the monetary damages caused by global warming, when they will be incurred, and the discount rate of money over that period of time. We will not attempt the calculation here, it is too complex, but we can discuss the parameters and some of the calculations done by others.
We’re told that climate change caused or intensified California’s wildfires — and that such fires are getting worse. As usual for such scary stories, these claims are only weakly supported by science — except for the ones that are outright fabrications. See what scientists say and decide for yourself.
A partisan divide has emerged in the European Parliament over proposals to beef up the governance of the Energy Union, with conservative and centre-right lawmakers rejecting what they described as an “outdated”, “inflexible” approach supported by the Greens and left-wing parties.
Essay by Dr. Susan Crockford (republished from her website https://polarbearscience.com )on Retraction request to Bioscience: FOIA emails document another harsh criticism of Amstrup’s 2007 polar bear model
Today I sent a letter to the editors of the journal Bioscience requesting retraction of the shoddy and malicious paper by Harvey et al. (Internet blogs, polar bears, and climate-change denial by proxy) published online last week.
The letter reveals information about the workings of the polar bear expert inner circle not known before now, so grab your popcorn.
La Banque mondiale a présenté le 18 juillet une étude soulignant les énormes besoins de minerais et de métaux associés à la transition « bas carbone » dans le monde. Un aspect souvent ignoré de cette transition.
by Steve Penn, November 22, 2017 in ClimateChangeDispatch
(…) It seemed obvious to me that there was a climate change problem. I heard about it—and read about it—every day in the news. Eventually, I started to study the issue, thinking that I needed to understand it better to write informed articles on the subject (…)
La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse
