Archives par mot-clé : Global Warming

climate and geology, climate-debate

Is Climate Change Real?

by Robert Lyman,  March 23, 2021 in FriendsofScienceCalgary

Contributed by Robert Lyman © 2021 Full bio here.

Is climate change real? Journalists in Canada have had a field day with that question since it was debated at the Conservative Party policy meeting on March 20, 2021. It is the perfect question to ask if you want to boil a mind-numbingly complex set of issues into a simple question that can be used to misinform and confuse people. The proper answer to that question is another one. To what part of the climate policy conundrum are you referring?

You see, the “realness” (or truthfulness, or even importance) of climate policy depends on the answer to several questions, not one. Let’s break them down, and comment ever so briefly on the possible answers.

Is global warming occurring?

The global climate has been changing for millions of years, with temperatures rising and falling. They were as high as they are today during Roman times and the Medieval Warm Period. Since 1850, global average temperatures have risen slightly more than one degree Celsius.

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climate-debate

Major February global temperature drop reveals the real climate control knob

by J. Bastardi, March 7, 2021 in CFACT

By now all of you know my belief ( bias) that it’s the oceans, and more so the tropical oceans, that are the biggest control knob of the weather and climate. If you really wanted to make this a controlled classroom experiment (nature is not a classroom with easy controls)  then I venture to say that the real way to know man’s influence is to have SST’s return to where they were in the 1970s, give it a couple of years for the water vapor adjustment, ( and if I am right. co2 will adjust as warmer oceans outsource it, so the outsourcing to the air will decrease) and see the difference there. And there you may be able to make an irrefutable argument for man’s contribution, Unfortunately for those who will not look at anything else,  that is likely to be quite small, but on the other hand, unlike the warming we have had which is really in the coldest driest places and more so at their coldest driest time of the year, you would likely find the lions share of what warming would be where life thrives.. As small as that has been, less than .25C of the numbers we see all the time that tell us that at. a bit over 59 degrees the planet is overheating, it is liable to be even less detectable and certainly as or more adaptable than what we seemed to have adapted to nicely here.

But the fear of course is runaway warming which is interesting since it counters Le Chateliers,  which I never hear anyone bring up, most likely because it’s a simple explanation. And a simple explanation would impact a lot of things relying on a done deal, complex explanation that the public must accept because they could never understand.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Does “global warming” mean it’s warming everywhere?

by C. Kennedy, Oct 29, 2020 in NOAAClimate.gov

No, “global warming” means Earth’s averageannual air temperature is rising, but not necessarily in every single location during all seasons across the globe.  It’s like your grades. If one semester you get all Bs and Cs, and the next you get all As and Cs, your grade point average rises, even though you didn’t improve in every class.

That’s the way it is with Earth’s near-surface temperature as atmospheric greenhouse gas levels climb. Temperature trends across the entire globe aren’t uniform because of the diverse geography on our planet—oceans versus continents, lowlands versus mountains, forests versus deserts versus ice sheets—as well as natural climate variability. When you’re zoomed in on a particular place, you may not be able to see the overall trend.

It is only when scientists calculate the average of temperature changes from every place on Earth over the course of a year to produce a single number, and then look at how that number has changed over time that a very clear, global warming trend emerges. In other words, it’s only when we “zoom out” to the planet-wide scale that the trend is obvious: despite a few, rare areas experiencing an overall cooling trend, the vast majority of places across the globe are warming.

 

 

Observed trend in temperature from 1900 to 2012; yellow to red indicates warming, while shades of blue indicate cooling. Gray indicates areas for which there are no data. There are substantial regional variations in trends across the planet, though the overall trend is warming. Map from FAQ appendix of the 2014 National Climate Assessment. Originally provided by NOAA NCDC.

The reason a “zoomed out” view makes the long-term trend so clear is that Earth’s annual average temperatures from year to year are found to be very stable when nothing is forcing it to change. Today, though, every decade since 1960 has been warmer than the last, and the last three decades each have been the warmest on record. Relative to geologic time, the warming that has occurred—1.8°F (1°C) over a span of about 120 years—is an unusually large temperature change in a relatively short span of time.

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climate-debate

Claim: The Temperature Spike Just Prior to the Little Ice Age can Teach Us about Modern Global Warming

by E. Worall, Jan 7, 2021 in WUWT

According to Patric Seifert, a tropospheric researcher at the Leibniz Institute in Germany, a large scale temperature spike occurred just before the onset of the Little Ice Age. Seifert does not think global temperatures are about to crash, but he thinks conditions in Europe are similar enough to the 14th century that historical reconstructions of this medieval heatwave, the Dantean Anomaly, can help us understand what we will face as the world continues to warm.

Extreme 14th Century Droughts May Provide Insight Into Our Climate Change Crisis 

CARLY CASSELLA
9 JANUARY 2021

Scientists are studying a major, once-in-a-century drought from Medieval Europe to better understand how extreme weather events indicate rapid climate changes.

In the years leading up to the Little Ice Age, between 1302 and 1307, many regions on the European continent were facing exceptional heat and drought, according to historical records and data collected from tree rings and sediment cores.

These extreme natural events, while not driven by human emissions, hold similar characteristics to recent weather anomalies, and they could help us better predict the course of modern-day climate change.

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“Even if it was a phase of cooling in the Middle Ages and we are now living in a phase of [hu]man-made warming, there could be parallels,” says Patric Seifert, a tropospheric researcher at the Leibniz Institute in Germany.

“The transitional period between two climate phases could be characterized by smaller temperature differences between the latitudes and cause longer-lasting large-scale weather patterns, which could explain an increase in extreme events.“

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better to know...?, climate-debate

NYT: “What happened to Global Warming?”

by E. Worrall, Dec 17, 2020 in WUWT

NYT rolling out the tired global warming makes winter storms more extreme narrative.

How climate change is affecting winter storms.


By John Schwartz

The major winter storm that hit the Eastern United States on Wednesday and Thursday probably prompted some people to ask, “What happened to global warming?”

But although it’s becoming increasingly clear that climate change does have an effect on storms, the relationship can be complex and, yes, counterintuitive. “There were these expectations that winter was basically going to disappear on us,” said Judah Cohen, director of seasonal forecasting at AER, a company that provides information to clients about weather and climate-related risk.

Although winters are becoming warmer and somewhat milder over all, extreme weather events have also been on the increase, and especially in the Northeastern United States, as Dr. Cohen pointed out in a recent paper in the journal Nature Climate Change. From the winter of 2008-9 until 2017-18, there were 27 major Northeast winter storms, three to four times the totals for each of the previous five decades.

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Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/17/climate/climate-change-winter.html

If global warming to date has caused a three to four fold increase in severe winter storms, imagine the bitterly cold weather the next few decades of global warming will bring.

We must act now, before global warming causes us all to freeze to death!

climate-debate

WHY CARBON DIOXIDE CAN’T CAUSE WARMING IN THE ATMOSPHERE, BY PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF GEOLOGY AT WESTERN WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY

by Cap Allon, July 5, 2020 in Electroverse

ABSTRACT

A greenhouse gas is a gas that absorbs and emits infrared radiation.

The primary greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone. Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is a nontoxic, colorless, odorless gas.

Water vapor accounts for by far the largest greenhouse effect (90–85%) because water vapor emits and absorbs infrared radiation at many more wavelengths than any of the other greenhouse gases, and there is much more water vapor in the atmosphere than any of the other greenhouse gases. CO2 makes up only a tiny portion of the atmosphere (0.040%) and constitutes only 3.6% of the greenhouse effect. The atmospheric content of CO2 has increased only 0.008% since emissions began to soar after 1945. Such a tiny increment of increase in CO2 cannot cause the 10°F increase in temperature predicted by CO2 advocates.

Computer climate modelers build into their models a high water vapor component, which they claim is due to increased atmospheric water vapor caused by very small warming from CO2, and since water vapor makes up 90–95% of the greenhouse effect, they claim the result will be warming.

The problem is that atmospheric water vapor has actually declined since 1948, not increased as demanded by climate models. If CO2 causes global warming, then CO2 should always precede warming when the Earth’s climate warms up after an ice age. However, in all cases, CO2 lags warming by ∼800 years. Shorter time spans show the same thing–warming always precedes an increase in CO2 and therefore it cannot be the cause of the warming.

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unclassified

MAN-MADE GLOBAL WARMING DESTROYED IN 500 WORDS, BY GEOLOGIST DR ROGER HIGGS

by Cap Allon, May 27, 2020 in Electroverse

INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE IPCC) THREE PILLARS OF MAN-MADE GLOBAL WARMING: COLLAPSED — by Dr Roger Higgs (DPhil Oxford, geology, 1982-86), Geoclastica LtdTechnical Note 2020-7, 25th May 2020, amended 26-5-2020 on ResearchGate.

The IPCC says ongoing warming is due to man’s CO2 emissions, hence ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’ (AGW). However, the 3 pillars on which they base this claim are unscientific and quickly disproved.

Continuer la lecture de MAN-MADE GLOBAL WARMING DESTROYED IN 500 WORDS, BY GEOLOGIST DR ROGER HIGGS →

climate-debate

Systemic Misuse of Scenarios in Climate Research and Assessment

by Pielke R & Richtie J, April 21, 2020

Abstract

Climate science research and assessments have misused scenarios for more than a decade. Symptoms of this misuse include the treatment of an unrealistic, extreme scenario as the world’s most likely future in the absence of climate policy and the illogical comparison of climate projections across inconsistent global development trajectories. Reasons why this misuse arose include (a) competing demands for scenarios from users in diverse academic disciplines that ultimately conflated exploratory and policy relevant pathways, (b) the evolving role of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – which effectively extended its mandate from literature assessment to literature coordination, (c) unforeseen consequences of employing a nuanced temporary approach to scenario development, (d) maintaining research practices that normalize careless use of scenarios in a vacuum of plausibility, and (e) the inherent complexity and technicality of scenarios in model-based research and in support of policy. As a consequence, the climate research community is presently off-track. Attempts to address scenario misuse within the community have thus far not worked. The result has been the widespread production of myopic or misleading perspectives on future climate change and climate policy. Until reform is implemented, we can expect the production of such perspectives to continue. However, because many aspects of climate change discourse are contingent on scenarios, there is considerable momentum that will make such a course correction difficult and contested – even as efforts to improve scenarios have informed research that will be included in the IPCC 6th Assessment.

Keywords: climate, scenarios, assessment, research integrity

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better to know...?, climate-debate

How much human-caused global warming should we expect?

by Andy May, March 21, 2020 in WUWT

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C3S20 asks, how much human-caused warming will occur if we do nothing, that is, continue “business-as-usual?” It’s unfortunate, but the IPCC, for all their work, do not adequately answer that question, their projections are all based on abstract “scenarios.” C3S20 break this overall question into five parts:

  1. What would greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) be, if we did nothing and continued normally?
  2. For each GHG, how do emissions relate to the change in atmospheric concentration?
  3. What would the global temperature be if GHG concentrations were at “preindustrial” levels?
  4. How sensitive are global temperatures to GHG concentrations?
  5. How much warming should we expect if we do nothing?

C3S20 tell us the Paris Agreement conclusion that we need to limit global warming to 2°C above preindustrial levels suffers from several unknowns.

  1. The preindustrial period is not formally defined. The preindustrial temperature and greenhouse gas level are not specified. In fact, several time periods, temperatures and GHG levels are used as “preindustrial” in the latest IPCC AR5 report.

  2. The assumptions that warming is bad and increasing levels of CO2 are bad, are not supported with any data. Numerous studies have concluded that some warming is good for humankind and additional CO2 is good for plants.

  3. The penultimate draft of AR5 identified the period 1850 to 1900 as the preindustrial baseline for CO2 and temperature. This was the end of the Little Ice Age, the coldest periodin the last several thousand years. Why use that period as a baseline (Luning and Vahrenholt 2017)? This is not explained, and the final draft of the report removed the reference to the 1850 to 1900 baseline.

  4. If the UNFCC and the Paris Agreement assume “climate change” and “Human-caused Climate Change” are synonymous, how do they explain that climate has change much quicker and much more dramatically many times in the past 13,000 years before human civilization began and well before industrialization?

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climate-debate

Débattre du climat : quel contenu ?

by M. de Rougemont, 25 février 2020 in EuropeanScientist

Dès lors que la moindre critique est faite à propos de la doxa climatique son auteur se verra systématiquement désigné comme négationniste. Si, par-dessus le marché, ladite critique est pleine de bon sens, alors des caciques de ce système s’empressent de publier une tribune publique afin de mettre l’intru au pilori, évitant bien d’entrer en matière et de traiter des questions posées. Il s’agit de bien rappeler qui a droit à la parole et de rappeler aux non-sachants que le débat est clos car la cause est entendue. Un bizarre syndicat international de presse dictant la bien-pensance climatique a d’ailleurs décidé que laisser s’exprimer des voix critiques serait leur faire une part trop belle. La célérité et le ton de ces répliques témoignent pourtant d’une grande inquiétude car faire taire l’intrus n’a jamais été une manifestation de force et de tranquillité. Cela laisse même à penser que s’il y avait complot, ce serait plutôt celui destiné à éviter à tout prix la nécessaire dispute autour d’un sujet si important.

Nonobstant la clôture bien prématurée de ce débat jamais initié, il faut en décrire les chapitres qui devraient le composer.  Ce drame climatique se déroule sur trois scènes : scientifique, stratégique et politique.

SCIENCE ET PSEUDO-SCIENCE

Les données issues de moins de deux siècles d’observations directes, dont moins de cinquante ans par satellite, et de la paléoclimatologie nous enseignent les variations passées et certaines corrélations ou manques de corrélation. Ces données ne font pas l’objet de réfutations majeures et fondées. Un réchauffement est donc bien constaté depuis la fin du petit âge glaciaire coïncidant avec le début de l’ère industrielle ; il est de l’ordre de 0.8 à 1 °C avec des fluctuations dont certaines restent encore inexpliquées.

Continuer la lecture de Débattre du climat : quel contenu ? →

better to know...?, climate-debate

Do We Really Have Only 12 Years to Live?

by Andy May, February 23, 2020 in WUWT

Why have uninformed celebrities and politicians been telling everyone, who will listen, we are all going to die in a climate catastrophe in 10 to 30 years? U.N. General Assembly President María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés of Ecuador warned us…

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However, these absurd statements are not supported by even the most fanatical climate alarmists, like Kate Marvel (NASA), Gavin Schmidt (NASA), Katharine Hayhoe (Texas Tech), or Andrea Dutton (University of Florida) (link). The original inspiration for these statements came from a 2018 IPCC report entitled Global Warming of 1.5°C. Even the alarmist Scientific American does not think the world is ending in twelve years.

We will discuss this IPCC report below, but first let’s look at some critical evidence that is not in the report. As usual the IPCC dodges the current benefits of warming and additional CO2, so we need to fill in this gap.

A little over two years ago I posted an essay entitled “Calculating the Cost of Global Warming,” it did not calculate a cost, but discussed calculations made by others. Global warming and the increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere are not existential threats to mankind or to nature. Global warming will not go “runaway,” this idea, discussed here, has been discredited by climate change skeptics and by climate alarmists alike (see here and here for examples). So, given that global warming and additional CO2 will not harm us, we are reduced to a discussion of the economic impacts and benefits, both positive and negative, of global warming and additional CO2.

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Figure 2. A graph of CMIP5 global tropospheric temperatures (5-year averages) versus satellite and weather balloon observations. These predictions are for the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 4.5, a moderate case. Source: House of Representatives report by Dr. John Christy.

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climate-debate

Climate Change is not a problem: Unless we make it one.

by Martin Capages Jr., February 11, 2020 in WUWT

INTRODUCTION

As long as humans have been on Earth, they have been adapting to changes in regional climates. A regional climate is the average of the weather for a relatively long period of time, usually 30+ years, at a particular location on the planet. The natural periodicity of prolonged regional weather variations has been documented in various ways by humans for eons. For a comparison of human civilization in the northern hemisphere to Greenland ice core temperatures for the last 18,000 years see here. Some of the means of documenting changes in long term weather patterns, i.e. climate change, include crude prehistoric cave drawings of the animals and plants, paintings of frozen rivers (see Figure 1 of ice skating on the River Thames in 1684), and archaeological digs. There are also written records of climatic conditions as early as 5,000 years ago, perhaps even earlier. Ice, subsea, peat and lake bed cores are also used, for a more detailed discussion of the methods used see here and the links therein.

Figure 1. Ice skating on the River Thames in London in January 1684, during the Little Ice Age. Museum of London, link.

 

Continuer la lecture de Climate Change is not a problem: Unless we make it one. →

climate-debate, energy and fields

Economic impact of energy consumption change caused by global warming

by P. Lange & K. Gregory, February 8, 2020 in ClimateEtc.

A new paper ‘Economic impact of energy consumption change caused by global warming’ finds global warming may be beneficial.

In this blog post we reproduce the Abstract, Policy Implications and Conclusions and parts of the Introduction, Results and Discussion. We encourage you to read the entire paper.

Abstract: This paper tests the validity of the FUND model’s energy impact functions, and the hypothesis that global warming of 2 °C or more above pre-industrial times would negatively impact the global economy. Empirical data of energy expenditure and average temperatures of the US states and census divisions are compared with projections using the energy impact functions with non-temperature drivers held constant at their 2010 values. The empirical data indicates that energy expenditure decreases as temperatures increase, suggesting that global warming, by itself, may reduce US energy expenditure and thereby have a positive impact on US economic growth. These findings are then compared with FUND energy impact projections for the world at 3 °C of global warming from 2000. The comparisons suggest that warming, by itself, may reduce global energy consumption. If these findings are correct, and if FUND projections for the non-energy impact sectors are valid, 3 °C of global warming from 2000 would increase global economic growth. In this case, the hypothesis is false and policies to reduce global warming are detrimental to the global economy. We recommend the FUND energy impact functions be modified and recalibrated against best available empirical data. Our analysis and conclusions warrant further investigation.

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climate-debate

Gavin’s Falsifiable Science

by Willis Eschenbach, January 18, 2020 in WUWT

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Folks are interested in why the temperature of the planet changes over time. That’s at the center of modern climate science. My theory, on the other hand, arose from my being interested in a totally different question about climate—why is the temperature so stable? For example, over the 20th Century, the temperature only varied by ± 0.3°C. In the giant heat engine that is the climate, which is constantly using solar energy to circulate the oceans and the atmosphere, this is a variation of 0.1% … as someone who has dealt with a variety of heat engines, I can tell you that this is amazing stability. The system is ruled by nothing more solid than waves, wind, and water. So my question wasn’t why the climate changes as it does.

My question was, why is the climate so stable?

And my answer is, there are a host of what are called “emergent phenomena” that arise when local temperatures go above some local threshold. They include the timing and strength of the daily emergence of the cumulus cloud field in the tropics; the development of thunderstorms; the emergence of dust devils when temperatures get hot; the action of the El Nino/La Nina pump moving warm water to the poles; and various “oscillations” like the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

These emergent phenomena arise out of nowhere, last for some length of time, and then disappear completely. And acting together, they all work to prevent both the overcooling and the overheating of the planet. And as mentioned above, I say that these phenomena acted to reduce the length and the depth of the effect of the Pinatubo volcano. See my post called “When Eruptions Don’t” for another look at how the climate system responds to a decrease in incoming solar energy due to volcanic eruptions.

 

I originally published this theory in the journal Energy and Environment. I followed that up with a posting of the same ideas here at Watts Up With That in a post called The Thermostat Hypothesis.

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Figure 2. Global stratospheric temperatures measured from space.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Climate models continue to project too much warming

by Dr. J. Lehr & J. Taylor, January 6, 2020 in CFACT

A recently published paper, titled “Evaluating the Performance of Past Climate Model Projections,” mistakenly claims climate models have been remarkably accurate predicting future temperatures. The paper is receiving substantial media attention, but we urge caution before blindly accepting the paper’s assertions.

As an initial matter, the authors of the paper are climate modelers. Climate modelers have a vested self-interest in convincing people that climate modeling is accurate and worthy of continued government funding. The fact that the authors are climate modelers does not by itself invalidate the paper’s conclusions, but it should signal a need for careful scrutiny of the authors’ claims.

Co-author Gavin Schmidt has been one of the most prominent and outspoken persons asserting humans are creating a climate crisis and that immediate government action is needed to combat it. Again, Schmidt’s climate activism does not by itself invalidate the paper’s conclusions, but it should signal a need for careful scrutiny of the authors’ claims.

The paper examines predictions made by 17 climate models dating back to 1970. The paper asserts 14 of the 17 were remarkably accurate, with only three having predicted too much warming.

One of the paper’s key assertions is that global emissions have risen more slowly than commonly forecast, which the authors claim explains why temperatures are running colder than the models predicted. The authors compensate for this by adjusting the predicted model temperatures downward to reflect fewer-than-expected emissions. Yet fewer-than-expected greenhouse gas emissions undercut the climate crisis narrative.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has already reduced its initial projection of 0.3 degrees Celsius of warming per decade to merely 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade. Keeping in mind that skeptics have typically predicted approximately 0.1 degree Celsius of warming per decade, the United Nations has conceded skeptics have been at least as close to the truth with their projections as the United Nations. Moreover, global temperatures are likely only rising at a pace of 0.13 degrees Celsius per decade, which is even closer to skeptic predictions.

Even after the authors adjusted the model predictions to reflect fewer-than-expected greenhouse gas emissions, there remains at least one very important problem, which immediately jumped out at us when carefully examining the paper’s findings: The paper’s assertion of remarkable model accuracy rests on a substantial temperature spike from 2015 through 2017. A strong, temporary El Niño caused the short-term spike in global temperatures from 2015 to 2017. The plotted temperature data in the paper, however, show that temperatures prior to the El Niño spike ran consistently colder than the models’ adjusted predicted temperatures. When the El Niño recedes, as they always do, temperatures will almost certainly resume running colder than the models predicted, even after adjusting for fewer-than-expected greenhouse gas emissions.

Another problem with the paper is that it utilizes controversial and dubiously adjusted temperature datasets rather than more reliable ones. The paper relies on temperature datasets that are not replicated in any real-world temperature measurements. Surface temperature measurements and measurements taken by highly precise satellite instruments show significantly less warming than the authors claim. The authors rely on temperature datasets that utilize controversial adjustments to claim more recent warming than what has actually been measured, which further undercuts their claim of remarkable model accuracy.

Contrary to what has been written in many breathless media reports, the most important takeaways from the paper are that greenhouse gas emissions are rising at a more modest pace than predicted, the modest pace of global temperature rise reflects the modest pace of rising emissions, and climate models have consistently predicted too much warming—even after accounting for fewer-than-expected greenhouse gas emissions. A temporary spike in global temperatures reflecting the recent El Niño does not save the models from their consistent inaccuracy.

climate-debate

Climate change and bushfires — More rain, the same droughts, no trend, no science

by JoNova, December 24, 2019

To Recap: In order to make really Bad Fires we need the big three: Fuel, oxygen, spark.Obviously getting rid of air and lightning is beyond the budget. The only one we can control is fuel. No fuel = no fire.   Big fuel = Fireball apocalypse that we can;t stop even with help from Canada, California, and New Zealand.

The most important weather factor is rain, not an extra 1 degree of warmth. To turn the nation into a proper fireball, we “need” a good drought.  A lack of rain is a triple whammy — it dries out the ground and the fuel — and it makes the weather hotter too. Dry years are hot years in Australia, wet years are cool years. It’s just evaporative cooling for the whole country. The sun has to dry out the soil before it can heat up the air above it.  Simple yes?  El Nino’s mean less rain (in Australia), that’s why they also mean “hot weather”.

So ask a climate scientist the right questions and you’ll find out what the ABC won’t say: That global warming means more rain, not less. Droughts haven’t got worse, and climate models are really, terribly, awfully pathetically bad at predicting rain.

Four reasons carbon emissions are irrelevant

1. Droughts are the same as they ever were.

In the 178 year record, there is no trend. All that CO2 has made no difference at all to the incidence of Australian droughts. Climate scientists have shown droughts have not increased in Australia. Click the link to see Melbourne and Adelaide. Same thing.

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climate-debate

3 degrees C?

by J. Curry, December 23, 2019 in ClimateEtc.

Is 3 C warming over the 21st century now the ‘best estimate’?  A reframing of how we think about climate change over the 21st century, and my arguments for 1 C.

There has been much discussion over on twitter of the new article by David Wallace-Wells:  We’re Getting a Clearer Picture of the Climate Future — and It’s n Not as Bad as it Once Looked.  ‘This article is interesting for several reasons, especially since Wallace-Wells has been ‘alarmist in chief.’

Simply put, it is now becoming more widely accepted that RCP8.5 concentration/emissions scenario is highly implausible.  See my previous post:

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better to know...?, climate-debate, COP25

Who Is Winning The Climate Wars? (Part Two)

by F. Menton, December 18, 2019 in ClimateChangeDispatch

A few weeks ago (November 22), in a post titled “Who Is Winning The Climate Wars?”, I undertook to begin documenting the ever-growing chasm between the unhinged rhetoric of climate campaigners and the reality out there in the world.

Let’s collect a few data points over the past several weeks.

You probably know that the UN held its annual big climate conference this year in Madrid during the first two weeks of December.

That event provided the occasion for many campaigners to ramp up the volume of their claims, trying once again to stampede government representatives into agreeing to impoverish their people.

A few examples:

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The fact is that outside of some wildly guilty European countries and the loons in the U.S. Democratic Party’s far Left, fewer and fewer people pay any attention whatsoever to the absurd climate apocalypse rhetoric.

climate-debate

Why Apocalyptic Claims About Climate Change Are Wrong

by P. Homewood, November 29, 2019 in NotaLotoPeopleKnowThat

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Journalists and activists alike have an obligation to describe environmental problems honestly and accurately, even if they fear doing so will reduce their news value or salience with the public. There is good evidence that the catastrophist framing of climate change is self-defeating because it alienates and polarizes many people. And exaggerating climate change risks distracting us from other important issues including ones we might have more near-term control over.

I feel the need to say this up-front because I want the issues I’m about to raise to be taken seriously and not dismissed by those who label as “climate deniers” or “climate delayers” anyone who pushes back against exaggeration.

With that out of the way, let’s look whether the science supports what’s being said.

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See also: Michael Shellenberger: Apocalypse Cancelled?

unclassified

Half of 21st Century Warming Due to El Nino

by Roy Spencer, May 13, 2019 in GlobalWarming

A major uncertainty in figuring out how much of recent warming has been human-caused is knowing how much nature has caused. The IPCC is quite sure that nature is responsible for less than half of the warming since the mid-1900s, but politicians, activists, and various green energy pundits go even further, behaving as if warming is 100% human-caused.

The fact is we really don’t understand the causes of natural climate change on the time scale of an individual lifetime, although theories abound. For example, there is plenty of evidence that the Little Ice Age was real, and so some of the warming over the last 150 years (especially prior to 1940) was natural — but how much?

The answer makes as huge difference to energy policy. If global warming is only 50% as large as is predicted by the IPCC (which would make it only 20% of the problem portrayed by the media and politicians), then the immense cost of renewable energy can be avoided until we have new cost-competitive energy technologies.

The recently published paper Recent Global Warming as Confirmed by AIRSused 15 years of infrared satellite data to obtain a rather strong global surface warming trend of +0.24 C/decade. Objections have been made to that study by me (e.g. here) and others, not the least of which is the fact that the 2003-2017 period addressed had a record warm El Nino near the end (2015-16), which means the computed warming trend over that period is not entirely human-caused warming.

If we look at the warming over the 19-year period 2000-2018, we see the record El Nino event during 2015-16 (all monthly anomalies are relative to the 2001-2017 average seasonal cycle):

 

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climate-debate

Renowned German Geologist Shocks Audience: “Climate Change Totally Exaggerated”…”Warming Least Of Our Problems” By P Gosselin on 12. Oct

par P. Gosselin, October 12, 2019 in NoTricksZone

It’s unusual to see rationality over climate change in the German media, but sometimes it manages to get through.

In April this year I missed an important podcast interview with one of the world’s most prominent Sahara Desert researchers, geologist Dr. Stefan Kröpelin, by the Düsseldorf-based German daily, Rheinische Post.

Image: University of Cologne

The two RP hosts conducting the interview seemed to expect Dr. Kröpelin would tell the audience how dire the consequences of man-made global warming are on the Sahara Desert and planet overall.

They didn’t get what they bargained for.

Warming does not lead to desertification

Instead, in the interview, Dr. Kröpelin rejected in very clear terms man’s major climatic impact and that global warming is only negative.

Kröpelin told listeners that history is very clear: When the globe is cold, the deserts expand. And when the globe is warm, deserts become greener and far more fruitful.

Kröpelin is a leading expert

Kröpelin has been studying the Sahara for over 40 years, spending weeks and months each year on site gathering data a reconstructing past climates. Naturedescribed Kröpelin as “one of the most devoted Sahara explorers of our time.”

At about 9 minutes into the interview, he explains how the Sahara was massive in size during the last glacial period, and that about ten thousand years ago it greened up once temperatures shot up early in the Holocene.

When asked (10:15) if he worries that things in the Sahara “will get much worse” due to climate change, Kröpelin tells the host and audience: “First, that is a statement I 100% reject”, adding that localized desertification has more to do with the population growth at the edges of the desert and that the people who live there are cutting down trees and extracting water from the ground.

Rising precipitation, shrinking desert

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climate-debate

Has global warming stopped? The tap of incoming energy cannot be turned off

by Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, October 10, 2019 in WUWT

As a result of industrialization, the carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere has increased continuously over the past 100 years, which is considered as the main reason behind global warming. However, the observational global mean atmospheric temperature leveled off over the first decade of the 21st century, in contrast to the rapid warming during the late 20th century. This phenomenon, known as the “atmospheric warming slowdown” or “global warming hiatus”, has attracted great attention worldwide owing to its ostensible contradiction of the human-induced global warming theory.

The changes in ocean heat content might have a tight relationship with the atmospheric warming slowdown. Dr Changyu Li, Prof. Jianping Huang and their colleagues, a group of researchers from the Key Laboratory for Semi-Arid Climate Change of the Ministry of Education, College of Atmospheric Sciences, Lanzhou University, have had their findings published in Advances of Atmospheric Sciences.

In their paper, they explore the energy redistribution between the atmosphere and ocean at different latitudes and depths by using observational data as well as simulations of a coupled atmosphere-ocean box model.

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climate-debate

Why Haven’t the Tropics Warmed Much? A Tantalizing Piece of Evidence

by Dr. Roy Spencer, Sep. 28, 2019 in WUWT

The radiative resistance to global temperature change is what limits the temperature change in response to radiative forcing from (say) increasing CO2, or the sun suddenly deciding to pump out a 1 percent more sunlight.

If the climate system sheds only a little extra energy with warming, it warms even more until radiative energy balance is restored. If it sheds a lot of energy, then very little warming is required to restore global energy balance. This is the climate sensitivity holy grail, and it will determine just how much warming results from increasing CO2 in the atmosphere.

John Christy and I are preparing a paper based upon Dept. of Energy-sponsored research explaining why the tropical troposphere hasn’t warmed as much in nature as in climate models. (The discrepancy exists for surface temperature trends; for both RSS and UAH tropical tropospheric trends; as well as for global reanalysis datasets). Danny Braswell and I did a lot of research on this subject about 5-10 years ago, and published several papers.

Without going into the gory details of why it is so difficult to measure “feedbacks” (how strong the climate system radiatively resists a temperature change in response to radiative forcing), I’m going to present one graph of new results from our work that suggests where the problem with the models might be.

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climate-debate

‘Alarmism Enforcement’ On Hurricanes And Global Warming

by J. Curry, Sep; 9, 2019 in ClimateChangeDispatch

I used to be concerned about ‘consensus enforcement’ on the topic of climate change.  Now I am concerned about ‘alarmism enforcement.’

Ever since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, any hurricane causing catastrophic damage has been seized upon by climate alarmists as evidence of the horrors of global warming.

As if the record-holding hurricanes from the 1920s through the 1950s never happened.

The catastrophic damage to the Bahamas from Hurricane Dorian is no different.  The ‘official’ statement from the alarmist contingent of climate scientists appears to be this article in the Guardian, by Mann and Dessler:

Unfortunately for the alarmists, there are several factors that are getting in the way of the public promotion of the Mann/Dessler narrative:

Alabama-gate:  President Trump’s insistence on defending his erroneous statements about the forecasts for Dorian impacting Alabama.  A good article summarizing all this was co-authored by one of my former students at Georgia Tech, Brandon Miller [link].

After the Alabama National Weather Service office made a statement that Alabama was not at risk from Dorian, NOAA issued a statement defending President Trump  [link].

A WaPo article describes this latest development [link], and the subsequent outrage among scientists and NOAA employees (past and present.

This whole situation is taking the oxygen out of the room in terms of discussions regarding Dorian and global warming.  Gotta wonder if this was the strategy?

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climate-debate

Does NASA’s Latest Figures Confirm Global Warming?

by Anthony Watts, May 9, 2019 in ClimateChangeDispatch

That’s an indication of the personal bias of co-author Schmidt, who in the past has repeatedly maligned the UAH dataset and its authors because their findings didn’t agree with his own GISTEMP dataset.

In fact, Schmidt’s bias was so strong that when invited to appear on national television to discuss warming trends, in a fit of spite, he refused to appear at the same time as the co-author of the UAH dataset, Dr. Roy Spencer.

A breakdown of several climate datasets, appearing below in degrees centigrade per decade, indicates there are significant discrepancies in estimated climate trends:

  • AIRS: +0.24 (from the 2019 Susskind et al. study)
  • GISTEMP: +0.22
  • ECMWF: +0.20
  • RSS LT: +0.20
  • Cowtan & Way: +0.19
  • UAH LT: +0.18
  • HadCRUT4: +0.17

Which climate dataset is the right one? Interestingly, the HadCRUT4 dataset, which is managed by a team in the United Kingdom, uses most of the same data GISTEMP uses from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Global Historical Climate Network.

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